Ant property file

Ant property file

When you only need to set a small number of properties, you can choose to set them directly in the build file. However, for large projects, it is a good idea to store the information that sets the properties in a separate file.

Storing property information in a separate file provides the following benefits:

• It allows you to reuse the same build file, which uses different property settings in different execution environments. For example, building property files can be maintained independently in DEV, TEST, and PROD environments.
• This processing is beneficial when you do not know the value of the property in advance (for example, in a real-world environment). This allows you to perform build operations in other environments after you know the property values.

There are no hard rules here, but in general, property files are named build.properties and are stored on the same .xml as build files. You can create multiple build.build.properties.dev based on the deployment environment, such as: web security and build.properties.test.

The build..xml files associated with it are shown in the following example:

build.xml

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<project name="Hello World Project" default="info">

   <property file="build.properties"/>

   <target name="info">
      <echo>Apache Ant version is ${ant.version} - You are at ${sitename} </echo>
   </target>

</project>

build.properties

# The Site Name
sitename=wiki.w3cschool.cn
buildversion=3.3.2

Notice that in the above exercise, sitename is a custom property that maps after execution to a Web site wiki.w3cschool.cn "Property". Y ou can declare any number of properties in this way. In the example above, there is also a custom property buildversioin that indicates the version number currently built.

In addition to the two properties mentioned above, Ant provides additional built-in properties, which were mentioned in the previous section, but we'll give the related properties again.

In the example of this section, the Ant built-in property we use is the ant.version property.