Using Ant and Phing in the same repository

Post date

8 June 2012

Reading time

2 Minute Read

Categories

Computing

Here’s the scenario: you use Apache Ant for some of your build process, but you also have some tools in Phing. You run both ant and phing from your repository root. Because you use Ant most, the Ant targets are in build.xml, and Phing has to use phing.xml. Sure, you can run phing -f phing.xml ..., but where’s the fun in that? Enter the following build file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project name="myproject" default="usage">
    <condition property="file" value="phing.xml">
        <isset property="phing.version" />
    </condition>
    <condition property="file" value="ant.xml">
        <isset property="ant.version" />
    </condition>
    <import file="${file}" />
</project>

Now you can have Ant targets in ant.xml, and Phing targets in phing.xml! No doubt there are some repercussions with this approach — I’ve no idea how well antcall/phingcall tasks will fare using this — but it worked for us!