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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T14:56:34+00:00

For those of you that use Ant with multiple projects, where do you put

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For those of you that use Ant with multiple projects, where do you put the build.xml files? Do you put one in each project, or do you put them in a separate project that contains all your Ant-related files?

The usual recommendation is to put a build.xml in each project. But this has a few drawbacks:

  • It makes it hard to reuse common targets in multiple projects.

  • Sometimes you want to use Ant to export a project from source control and deploy it. Obviously you can’t do this if the build file is in the project itself.

But if you put them all in a common location:

  • People need to be aware of their location to use them; they can’t just use “ant -find” to find the current project’s file.

  • You can’t have different build instructions for different branches of the project.

What do you guys do?

EDIT: Thanks for the good suggestions so far. As far Maven, these aren’t Java projects, and I get the impression that Maven is only meant for Java.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Place the Ant files with the project. That is the de facto standard and recommended by the creator of Ant. I will try to address some of the issues you have brought up:

    • Reuse of common targets should be done using techniques as described by Eric Hatcher in his book Java Development with Ant. Basically, you extract all commonality into a some top level files that all other Ant files “inherit” from.

    • Using Ant to export a project from source control seems odd to me, but if you want to do this, use a different Ant file 🙂 You can make a target like ant export -Dproject=foo/bar.

    For Ant, I recommend you grab that book – it has a ton of helpful techniques.

    The real recommendation I would make though is to drop Ant and convert over to Maven – like the Apache Software Foundation did (they maintain both Ant and Maven).

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