Question

I am having a problem accessing environment variables in a netbeans build.xml ant script. Basically, when I use this code:

<target name="-pre-jar">

    <property environment="env"/>

    <echo message="${env.ANT_HOME}"/>
    <echo message="${env.JAVA_HOME}"/>

</target>

I receive output as follows:

compile:
${env.ANT_HOME}
${env.JAVA_HOME}

This is a problem because I need to access those filepaths later in the script. Also, I am sure that those two are defined as environment variables. Here is some proof from my terminal:

Lukas-Rezeks-MacBook-Pro:ant lukas$ echo $JAVA_HOME - $ANT_HOME
/System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Home - /ant

Am I doing something wrong in the ant build scripts variable declaration, or am I missing something obvious? Any feedback would be appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

You can either put

<property environment="env"/>

outside your target,

OR use “depends=” instead of “antcall” in your compile task.

I did the following test on my Linux:

<target name="pre-jar">
    <property environment="env"/>
    <echo message="${env.ANT_HOME}"/>
    <echo message="${env.JAVA_HOME}"/>
</target>

<target name="compile">
    <antcall target="pre-jar" />
    <echo message="${env.ANT_HOME}"/>
    <echo message="${env.JAVA_HOME}"/>
</target>

and when I ran “ant compile” I got the following:

compile:

pre-jar:
[echo] /opt/apache-ant-1.8.2
[echo] /opt/jdk1.7.0
[echo] ${env.ANT_HOME}
[echo] ${env.JAVA_HOME}

and when I used depends=”pre-jar”, the result was:

pre-jar:
[echo] /opt/apache-ant-1.8.2
[echo] /opt/jdk1.7.0

compile:
[echo] /opt/apache-ant-1.8.2
[echo] /opt/jdk1.7.0

when I put outside any target, the result was:

compile:

pre-jar:
[echo] /opt/apache-ant-1.8.2
[echo] /opt/jdk1.7.0
[echo] /opt/apache-ant-1.8.2
[echo] /opt/jdk1.7.0