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May 23, 2008

Using Ant with Cygwin

If you have ever tried building something with ant under Cygwin, you probably have noticed an error such as the following:

build.xml:35: c:\cygdrive\c\Progra~1\java/SunAppServer\jdk\lib\J2EE.jar

The current Ant documentation suggests that you should change your build.xml to wrap all such environment labels and class paths with code that executes cygpath, but this turns out to create some ugly code, especially if your build scripts use a lot of environment labels.

An alternative scheme that I have just come up with is to use a layer of indication. You can create an ant shell script that translates all of your necessary Cygwin environment labels using cygpath, and then call the ant.bat to do the actual build. The advantage of this approach is that more build.xml files are cross-platform out of the box and require very few, if any, tweaks.

The following file is an example of my approach:

#!/bin/sh
# OS-Specific Stuff
export PATH=`/usr/bin/cygpath --path --windows $PATH`
export TEMP=`/usr/bin/cygpath --path --windows $TEMP`
export TMP=`/usr/bin/cygpath --path --windows $TMP`

# Java Specific Stuff
export JAVA_HOME=`/usr/bin/cygpath --windows $JAVA_HOME`
export J2EE_HOME=`/usr/bin/cygpath --windows $J2EE_HOME`
export TOMCAT_HOME=`/usr/bin/cygpath --path --windows $TOMCAT_HOME`
export CLASSPATH=`/usr/bin/cygpath --path --windows $CLASSPATH`

# Ant Specific Stuff
ORIGINAL_ANT_HOME=$ANT_HOME
export ANT_HOME=`/usr/bin/cygpath --path --windows $ANT_HOME`

# Project-Specific Stuff
export WHATEVER_YOU_NEED=`/usr/bin/cygpath --windows $WHATEVER_YOU_NEED`

# Invoke the ANT.BAT via the original ANT_HOME value
$ORIGINAL_ANT_HOME/bin/ant.bat $1 $2 $3 $4 $5 $6 $7 $8 $9

Of course, this technique can be generally applied to other applications that use environment labels. Hope that helps.

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