ant Ant Properties How to declare and use property in Ant.
Example
Ant provides some built-in properties
| Property Name | Value |
|---|---|
| basedir | the absolute path of the project's basedir |
| ant.file | the absolute path of the buildfile. |
| ant.version | the version of Ant |
| ant.project.default-target | the name of the currently executing project's default target |
| ant.project.name | name of the project |
| ant.java.version | JVM version Ant detected |
In this example, We will create custom ant properties and use them to create a temporary directory and copy a file in it.
- Properties declared within same file.
<project name="Test Project for Ant" default="init">
<property name="temp.dir" value="${basedir}/temp" />
<target name="init" description="initialize">
<mkdir dir="${temp.dir}" />
<copy file="${basedir}/test.xml" todir="${temp.dir}/" />
</target>
</project>
In Ant, ${basedir} will refer to the base location or the location where your ant file is present. Here I declared a property named as
temp.dir
which will refer to basedir/temp location.
So, we call target init it will replace the placeholder ${temp.dir} with its actual value and start executing our script. This target will create a directory named temp under base directory copy test.xml file to temp directory.
- Properties declared in different files.
In this example, We will refer properties declared in different file. This is a sample file(app_version.xml) which contains application version.
<project name="Project Properties">
<property name="app.version" value="1.0" />
</project>
To include this file we will add the import ant task to import this file while executing ant targets.
<import file="app_version.xml" />
Above code will look like
<project name="Test Project for Ant" default="init">
<import file="app_version.xml" />
<property name="temp.dir" value="${basedir}/temp" />
<target name="init" description="initialize">
<mkdir dir="${temp.dir}" />
<copy file="${basedir}/test.xml" todir="${temp.dir}/" />
<echo message="App version is:${app.version}" />
</target>
Once the file is imported, it can be directly accessed via property name(app.version).
I used .xml file, same use case will also work for .properties files.
