Using ANT to Automate a Build Version Number

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Recently I’ve been writing some Mura plugins. One of the basic pieces of the plugin is the the config.xml file which contains metadata about your plugin. One piece of that metadata is the version number of the plugin. And every time I made a change to the plugin, I would go and change the version number in the config.xml to reflect the newest build number. So if the major version is 1 and the minor version is 2, and I’ve packaged this plugin 4 times, the version number should be 1.2.04.

Changing the build number manually every time became a hassle so I’ve cooked up a small ANT script to automate not only the task of build numbers, but also zipping up the plugin for deployment. My objective here is to first update the build number in the config.xml file then zip up all the files and directories minus the Eclipse .project file. The first thing we will need is a properties file. This will contain our build number.

#Date last modified put here by ANT
buildNumber=04

The intent here is that ANT will read this, automatically increment the value, and put that value into our config.xml. But how can ANT know how to do this? Good question! This is done by replacement tokens. Let’s see that shall we?

<plugin>
	<name>Hello World Plugin</name>

	<!-- the package value becomes a part of the directory name where the plugin is installed. -->
	<package>SayHelloPlugin</package>
	<version>1.2.@buildNumber@</version>
	<provider>AdamPresley.com</provider>
	<providerurl>http://www.adampresley.com</providerURL>
	<category>Application</category>

	<settings />
	<eventhandlers />

	<!-- For display objects the the location attribute determines whether display objects for
		  the plugin will execute locally of globallyLocally means
		  /[siteid]/includes/plugins/[package]_[pluginID]/Globally means /plugins/[package]_[pluginID]/
	-->
	<displayobjects location="global">
		<displayobject name="Say Hello" displayobjectfile="displayObjects/sayHello.cfm" />
	</displayobjects>
</plugin>

Notice the ** node? We have replacement token in there named **buildNumber**. This is denoted by the @ symbol on either side of the token. ANT has a command to find and replace that token with whatever you wish. How? First we need to load our properties file and increment the build number. Then we need to do the replacement. Here's how that works.

<propertyfile file="build.properties">
	<entry key="buildNumber" type="int" default="0" operation="+" pattern="00" />
</propertyfile>

<echo message="Updating build number in /plugin/config.xml" />
<replace file="${buildDir}\plugin\config.xml" propertyFile="build.properties">
	<replacefilter token="@buildNumber@" property="buildNumber" />
</replace>

The first task, ** reads the **build.properties** file and increments the **buildNumber** variable by using the ** task. We then use the ** task to replace that **@buildNumber@** token we placed in the **config.xml** file. The ** task tells ANT what token to replace, and what variable from the properties file to replace it with. Cool huh?!?

If you’d like some more info on the basics of ANT you can check out my other posts.

Here is a full example. Happy coding!

build.properties

#Date last modified put here by ANT
buildNumber=04

build.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
	<project name="Hello World Plugin" default="build" basedir=".">
		<description>
			ANT build script to build the Hello World Plugin for Mura
		</description>

		<propertyfile file="build.properties">
			<entry key="buildNumber" type="int" default="0" operation="+" pattern="00" />
		</propertyfile>

		<property name="sourceDir" location="C:\code\HelloPlugin" />
		<property name="buildDir" location="${sourceDir}\build" />

		<target name="build">
			<echo message="Build ${buildNumber}" />

			<echo message="Copying files to build folder..." />
			<mkdir dir="${buildDir}" />
			<copy todir="${buildDir}">
				<fileset dir="${sourceDir}">
					<include name="**/displayObjects/*" />
					<include name="**/plugin/*" />
					<include name="index.cfm" />
				</fileset>
			</copy>

			<echo message="Updating build number in /plugin/config.xml" />
			<replace file="${buildDir}\plugin\config.xml" propertyFile="build.properties">
				<replacefilter token="@buildNumber@" property="buildNumber" />
			</replace>

			<echo message="Zipping contents..." />
			<zip destfile="${sourceDir}\HelloPlugin.zip" basedir="${buildDir}" />

			<echo message="Cleaning up..." />
			<delete includeEmptyDirs="true">
				<fileset dir="${buildDir}" includes="**" />
			</delete>
		</target>
	</project>
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