Calling Ant from Maven using a property file

Consolidating builds for several projects can be a process which sometimes needs some creativity combining the tools already available.

Most of the time it is too risky and expensive to write everything from scratch - even if it is very tempting to do so. In case of Maven and Ant, there is the well known antrun-plugin which makes it possible to integrate Ant based builds into the Maven ecosystem. 

Below is an example how to call Ant from Maven using a property file to store values which may change often.

Maybe somebody finds it useful.

	<project default="main">
	<target name="main">
	<echo message="This line is executed in an external build.xml for javafx version: ${javafx.version}"/>
	</target>
	</project>

view raw build.xml hosted with ❤ by GitHub

	<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
	xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
	<modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
	<groupId>net.ladstatt.maven</groupId>
	<artifactId>example-pom-with-filtering</artifactId>
	<version>1.0.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
	<packaging>jar</packaging>
	<name>example-pom-with-filtering</name>
	<url>http://maven.apache.org</url>
	<properties>
	<project.build.sourceEncoding>UTF-8</project.build.sourceEncoding>
	</properties>
	<build>
	<filters>
	<filter>props.properties</filter>
	</filters>
	<plugins>
	<!-- http://mojo.codehaus.org/properties-maven-plugin/ -->
	<plugin>
	<groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
	<artifactId>properties-maven-plugin</artifactId>
	<version>1.0-alpha-2</version>
	<executions>
	<execution>
	<phase>validate</phase>
	<goals>
	<goal>read-project-properties</goal>
	</goals>
	<configuration>
	<files>
	<file>props.properties</file>
	</files>
	</configuration>
	</execution>
	</executions>
	</plugin>
	<plugin>
	<artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
	<version>1.7</version>
	<executions>
	<execution>
	<phase>package</phase>
	<configuration>
	<target>
	<!-- Place any Ant task here. You can add anything you can add between
	<target> and </target> in a build.xml. -->
	<property name="a.version" value="${a.version}" />
	<ant antfile="build.xml" />
	<echo
	message="This is ant called from maven for and providing a version number from a property file ${a.version}" />
	</target>
	</configuration>
	<goals>
	<goal>run</goal>
	</goals>
	</execution>
	</executions>
	</plugin>
	</plugins>
	</build>
	<dependencies>
	<dependency>
	<groupId>junit</groupId>
	<artifactId>junit</artifactId>
	<version>4.10</version>
	</dependency>
	</dependencies>
	</project>

view raw pom.xml hosted with ❤ by GitHub

a.version=1.0

view raw props.properties hosted with ❤ by GitHub