Home/ Questions/Q 6720259
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-26T09:11:28+00:00

I have couple of Netbeans projects with dependencies among them. By default, netbeans creates

  • 0

I have couple of Netbeans projects with dependencies among them. By default, netbeans creates build and dist folders under Project root folder when you build. I was able to change it to a common folder outside projects using relative paths. All I had to do was change build.dir and dist.dir properties in nbproject/project.properties file. When I build under the IDE, everything is building fine under common folder specified in the project file.

We have promotion build process that expects to generate all the generated class files (the jar files etc) under a specific build folder. This folder changes based on how a user invoked configure script for the whole system.

Lets say this directory is available in shell environment variable BUILD_ROOT.
What I am wondering is if there is a way to override build.dir and dist.dir that project.properties is specifying on ant command line when the build is invoked. That way I can reuse the same build system and generate the binaries where I want without changing project.properties file.

Currently we are maintaining separate ant build scripts for promotion vs IDE builds.

I appreciate any pointers.

Thanks
Video guy

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I figured out how. Ant lets you define properties on command line with -Dpropname=value. Once a property is assigned a value, Ant will ignore any assignment for that variable that it comes across in the xml/.properties files.

    1) First I edited nbproject/project.properties file and added a variable for toplevel build dir. Then I changed build.dir and dist.dir to use this variable.


    buildroot.dir=../../out
    build.dir=${buildroot.dir}/myprojname

    dist.dir=${buildroot.dir}/dist

    2) Then I made sure it works under Netbeans. When you go into Netbeans property panel for project, it showed the directory value right.

    3) Added a target in a Makefile to invoke this project like below.

    ant -f build.xml -Dbuildroot.dir=$(BUILD_ROOT)/java/out

    That was able to build my target on Linux build server in the master build directory. Basically the source folders are clean without any build related remnants.

    • 0