Develop Reference

ant fixcrlf include/exclude does not work

I am having little problem with fixcrlf from ant. When I try to compile for unix target with fixcrlf filter, it modifies all files in the target folder, no matter of includes and excludes. I expect it should not convert any files that are not in the includes patterns, or at least I could force some files to not be converted via excludes attribute. None of that I tried been able to exclude anything. Even some binary files are modified and as result screwed up.
According to fixcrlf documentation from apache site, these parameters should work like this:
includes: comma- or space-separated list of patterns of files that must be included.
excludes: comma- or space-separated list of patterns of files that must be excluded.
When I run ant with parameters -verbose and -debug, there is no information on that fixcrlf did.
<copy todir="target">
<fileset dir="source1"><exclude name="**/*.bak"/></fileset>
<fileset dir="source2"><exclude name="**/*.bak"/></fileset>
<filterchain>
<fixcrlf srcdir="${src}" includes="**/*.sh,**/*.properties" excludes="**/*.xml" eol="lf" />
</filterchain>
</copy>

Missing class errors running Java built with Ant

I have some code that I revised.
When I try to just run Ant in the directory it fails with missing classes. I can specify the location to the existing classes by using the -lib option to ant. The compile then works fine, however dist ZIP file that is created appears to have missing libraries, as when I try to run it, I see errors relating to missing classes which are the classes that I specified with the -lib option, so this is probably due to the way I have used the -lib option.
How can I force the regular Ant command to include the additional classes specified with the -lib command?

You can write a target that will copy your lib directory/files in your zip file.
Let's say create a temp dir then copy your files then execute target for copying lib directory and then zip temp dir.
<target name="copyLib">
<copy todir="${temp.dir}">
<fileset dir="${lib.dir}">
<include name="*.jar" />
</fileset>
</copy>
</target>
Update paths and call this target into your create zip target.

Compiler task could look like this:
<javac srcdir="${base}/src"
destdir="${base}/classes"
classpath="${base}/lib">
</javac>
And the zip task could look like this:
<zip
destfile="${base}/dist.jar"
basedir="${base}/classes"
includes="..."
excludes="...">
</zip>
So sources are compiled in classes and zipped in a jar, but libraries used for compile are not included in the jar, they are runtime dependencies.

I would suggest that you declare your paths at the top of your ANT scripts as follows, using a fileset.
<path id="build.path">
<fileset dir="lib" includes="*.jar"/>
</path>
Less error prone compared to forcing users to specify the correct "-lib" parameter.
Finally the same fileset can then be used to include the same jars inside the zip file you're creating:
<zip destfile="${dist.dir}/mycode.zip">
..
..
<fileset dir="lib" includes="*.jar"/>
</zip>

Filtering out service provider files from META-INF

My application needs to run both from the command-line and a web app. The way I've chosen to implement this is to have the entire application in a single jar file (i.e. my application-specific classes coexist with the classes from the jars my app uses). This makes the command-line use case simple, as the user only has to type java -jar JARNAME. For the web app use case, I simply include the jar in WEB-INF/lib and all is well, almost.
The problem I have is that a few of the jars I'm slurping into the single jar define providers in META-INF/services for the same service, so the single jar ends up with multiple entries in META-INF/services with the same name. (For the curious, these are Jersey jars, and the services are javax.ws.rs.ext.MessageBodyReader and javax.ws.rs.ext.MessageBodyWriter.) So I'm trying to prevent the MessageBody* service files from being slurped into my jar file. Here's how I'm trying (and failing) to accomplish that:
<jar destfile="build/jammies.jar">
<archives>
<zips>
<restrict>
<fileset dir="lib">
<include name="*.jar"/>
<exclude name="servlet-api.jar"/>
</fileset>
<rsel:not>
<rsel:name regex="META-INF/services/javax.ws.rs.ext.*"/>
</rsel:not>
</restrict>
</zips>
</archives>
</jar>
I do have the rsel namespace defined at the top of build.xml.
<project basedir="." default="compile"
xmlns:rsel="antlib:org.apache.tools.ant.types.resources.selectors">
So I don't understand why the restrict task isn't filtering out those particular service provider files.

I think its because the regex starts matching the filename strings from the start however no file begins with META-INF, they would begin with ${basedir}/WEB-INF/lib/META-INF...

Ant task for easier deployment

We have quite a big tree of source code, parts of it are deployed as two separate jar files. We need an easy control of what goes to which jar.
So far we do this by <exclude name="" /> and <include name="" /> tags, but this is quite inconvenient. The best option would be a separate config file with all the packages listed which we could comment out when needed, say with a '#' character.
Does something similar exist or do we have to write a new ant task that reads such a file and runs a <jar> task?

The best option would bee to seperate the code into different modules which can be build on their own (of course with dependencies to each other). Doing this also makes cyclic dependencies obvious and gives you the chance to optimize your code base.

ANT includes and excludes can be managed with external files and referenced in a fileset using includesfile and excludesfile attributes.
includesfile the name of a file; each
line of this file is taken to be an
include pattern.
excludesfile the
name of a file; each line of this file
is taken to be an exclude pattern.
For example:
<jar destfile="${dist}/lib/app1.jar">
<fileset dir=".">
<includesfile name="app1.properties"/>
</fileset>
</jar>
<jar destfile="${dist}/lib/app2.jar">
<fileset dir=".">
<includesfile name="app2.properties"/>
</fileset>
</jar>

ant : jar and zipfileset - copy files from one JAR into another

I am currently doing this:
<jar update="yes"
jarfile="${pwd}/dist/${release}_installer.jar">
<zipfileset src="${pwd}/dist/app.jar" includes="com/izforge/izpack/panels/**"/>
<zipfileset src="${pwd}/dist/app.jar" includes="com/xyz/img/logo.png"/>
</jar>
My existing installer JAR gets updated to include the files as needed, extracted from the app JAR.
So far, so good.
However, I want to modify the behaviour such that the path of the image file is different than what is being copied from:
Currently:
com/izforge/izpack/panels/MyIzPanel.class
com/xyz/img/logo.png
What I want:
com/izforge/izpack/panels/MyIzPanel.class
blah/img/logo.png
So I need to copy the files, but use <zipfileset> and <jar> in such a way that I can modify the directory structure.
Is there a way to do this, apart from unzipping the entire contents copying file and then zipping it back up again?
EDIT:
Link to earlier related question: ant task to remove files from a jar

You can use the fullpath attribute:
<zipfileset src="${pwd}/dist/app.jar"
includes="com/xyz/img/logo.png" fullpath="blah/img/logo.img"/>
If you need to copy several files you may want to have a look at the prefix attribute, e.g.:
<zipfileset src="${pwd}/dist/app.jar"
includes="**/*.png" prefix="blah/img"/>

In order to modify the directory structure within the archive on the fly you can use the task in combination with <mappedresources>, eg:
<jar file="target.jar" update="true">
<mappedresources>
<zipfileset src="source.jar">
<include name="com/xyz/img/*.png"/>
</zipfileset>
<mapper type="glob" from="com/xyz/img/*.png" to="bla/img/*.png" />
</mappedresources>
</jar>

You should probably look into zipgroupfileset as explained here.