Bootstrapping Maven dependencies into Ant

One thing about builds I detest: packing the universe into the source tree. Maven and Ivy are two good solutions for this problem, keeping your external dependencies out of your source control system. And they both work with Ant.

But how to get the ball rolling?

Helpfully, Ant has the get task for fetching files from the Internet. Thus I can fetch Ivy or the Maven-Ant bindings, plug them into build.xml, and pull down my other dependencies all without checking in anything outside of my project.

Here's how:

  1     <property name="target.dir" location="target"/>
  2     <property name="maven-artifact-ant.bootstrap.jar"
  3               location="${target.dir}/maven.artifact-ant-2.0.2-dep.jar"/>
  4 
  5     <target name="-check-get-maven-artifact-ant">
  6         <available property="-get-maven-artifact-ant-done"
  7                    file="${maven-artifact-ant.bootstrap.jar}"/>
  8     </target>
  9 
 10     <target name="-get-maven-artifact-ant"
 11             depends="-check-get-maven-artifact-ant"
 12             unless="-get-maven-artifact-ant-done">
 13         <mkdir dir="${target.dir}"/>
 14         <get src="http://www.apache.org/dist/maven/binaries/maven-artifact-ant-2.0.2-dep.jar"
 15              dest="${maven-artifact-ant.bootstrap.jar}"/>
 16     </target>
 17 
 18     <target name="-maven-artifact-ant" depends="-get-maven-artifact-ant">
 19         <typedef resource="org/apache/maven/artifact/ant/antlib.xml"
 20                  uri="urn:maven-artifact-ant">
 21             <classpath>
 22                 <pathelement location="${maven-artifact-ant.bootstrap.jar}"/>
 23             </classpath>
 24         </typedef>
 25     </target>
 26 
 27     <target name="init" depends="-maven-artifact-ant">
 28         <tstamp/>
 29         <!-- All the other init tasks: buildnumber, mkdir, et al -->
 30     </target>

In essence the steps are:

1. Check if there is already a downloaded jar (-check-get-maven-artifact-ant).
2. If not, fetch one from a well-known location (-get-maven-artifact-ant).
3. Load the bindings from the jar into Ant (-maven-artifact-ant).

Now build.xml is ready to proceed with Maven (or Ivy) for fetching dependencies and deploying them.