Building a project WAR file with Ant

You can build the project WAR file by using Ant tasks.

Before you can run Ant tasks, make sure that Apache Ant is installed. The minimum supported version of Ant is listed in System requirements.

Apache Ant 1.8.4 is included in MobileFirst Server. In the product_install_dir/shortcuts/ directory, the following scripts are provided:

For UNIX / Linux: ant
For Windows: ant.bat

These scripts are ready to run, which means that they do not require specific environment variables. If the JAVA_HOME environment variable is set, the scripts accept it.

Note: Since IBM® Worklight Foundation V6.2.0, the worklight-ant-builder.jar file is included in the IBM MobileFirst™ Platform Command Line Interface, whereas in earlier versions, it was included in MobileFirst Server. By default, worklight-ant-builder.jar is installed in the following location: <CLI Install Path>/public/worklight-ant-builder.jar. For example, on OSX, the default CLI Install Path is /Applications/IBM/Worklight-CLI. If you use the default installation path, the Ant task is installed here: /Applications/IBM/Worklight-CLI/public/worklight-ant-builder.jar.

The Ant task for building a MobileFirst project WAR file has the following structure:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project name="myProject" default="all">
  <taskdef resource="com/worklight/ant/defaults.properties">
    <classpath>
      <pathelement location="cli_install_dir/public/worklight-ant-builder.jar"/>
    </classpath>
  </taskdef>
  <target name="all">
    <war-builder projectfolder="."
                 destinationfolder="bin/war"
                 warfile="bin/project.war"
                 classesFolder="classes-folder"/>
  </target>
</project>

The <war-builder> element has the following attributes:

The projectfolder attribute specifies the path to your project.
The destinationfolder attribute specifies a folder for holding temporary files.
The warfile attribute specifies the destination and file name of the generated .war file
The classesFolder attribute specifies a folder with compiled Java™ classes to add to the .war file. .jar files in the projectfolder\server\lib directory are added automatically