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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T05:33:41+00:00

I am trying to do some stuff before a build of my Android project.

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I am trying to do some “stuff” before a build of my Android project.
The setup is roughly the following:

  • LibraryProject
  • AppA
  • AppB

I have run configurations for AppA + AppB
I know how to e.g. use the little checkmarks to e.g.

  • Deploy or not deploy
  • Run or not run

The one I am stuck with is Run Ant target.

What I want (the reason for this question) is telling my current running application (most of the time it is AppA when I press “run”, because I changed something in the code, to e.g. persist settings.

I have complete control over the app, and already wrote several scripts to e.g. talk via ADB to the device, or even talk to the current running app using UDP and a C# host application on my development machine. So if I am able to run a e.g. shutdown.exe (.NET written by me) I can tell my app to shutdown.

So to keep it “easy” I tried to get calc.exe to start when pressing “run” inside an Android project in Intellij. But I managed to get totally lost in the build.xml configuration IntelliJ uses for Android.

I tried:

  • adding an exec task to the build.xml
  • tell him to Run Ant targets
  • Adding some tests

They all have no effect. I can view the Ant Build in Intellij and start the task manually, still no effect (so I cant really know if they are started by the run configuration, because the may fail silently).

I added:

<target name="-pre-build">
    <exec executable="calc.exe"/>
    <echo message="HelloWorld"/>
</target>
<target name="-pre-compile">
       <exec executable="calc.exe"/>
        <echo message="HelloWorld"/>
</target>

Any tips what I am doing wrong? Oh, one more info. If I press the green button in the Ant Build toolbar on the highest level, android tells me something about “outdated build file”, but I think this is ok. Seems like he tries to run the whole Ant file then, which imports some android tasks before – but this is not what I want anyway.

So can anyone provide me an example (to start calc.exe). I will figure the rest out and update the post if neccessary for others to help.

Chris

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    IDEA doesn’t use any Ant build by default, what you see is probably the automatically generated build.xml for this project.

    You can create a new build.xml file with just the following inside:

    <project name="build" default="pre-build">
  <target name="pre-build">
    <exec executable="c:/windows/system32/calc.exe"/>
    <echo message="HelloWorld"/>
  </target>
</project>

    In the Android Run/Debug configuration Before Launch section specify this Ant target to be run:

    run ant before launch

    I’ve verified it with a small sample project and calc.exe gets properly executed before I run the Android configuration in IntelliJ IDEA.

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