Question

I have the following war task in my build.xml and even though needxmlfile is set to false, Ant (version 1.8.2) complains when the web.xml file does not exist (“BUILD FAILED … Deployment descriptor: /home/…/web/WEB-INF/web.xml does not exist“)

What am I missing?

  <target name="war" depends="build">                                                                           
    <mkdir dir="${build.dir}"/>                                                                                 
    <war                                                                                                        
      needxmlfile="false"                                                                                       
      basedir="${webroot.dir}"                                                                                  
      warfile="${build.dir}/${project.distname}.war"                                                            
      webxml="${webinf.dir}/web.xml">                                                                           
      <exclude name="WEB-INF/${build.dir}/**"/>                                                                 
      <exclude name="WEB-INF/src/**"/>                                                                          
      <exclude name="WEB-INF/web.xml"/>                                                                         
     </war>                                                                                                     
  </target>  

Answer 1

@O’Connor: thanks for the hint for using a fileset to pull the web.xml. However I am not sure you are correct about the needxmlfile set to true (at least in my experimentation I witnessed the opposite of what you describe). In any case, in the end I realized that not even the fileset is necessary since the war Ant task apparently packages everything under the basedir (unless explicitly excluded) so I am now using the following war task that works whether a web.xml file is present or not:

<target name="war" depends="build">                                                                      
   <mkdir dir="${build.dir}"/>                                                                            
   <war                                                                                                   
      needxmlfile="false"                                                                                  
      basedir="${webroot.dir}"                                                                             
      destfile="${build.dir}/${project.distname}.war">                                                      
      <exclude name="WEB-INF/${build.dir}/**"/>                                                            
      <exclude name="WEB-INF/src/**"/>                                                                     
    </war>                                                                                                
</target>         

Setting needxmlfile to “true” causes Ant to complain if no web.xml file can be found during “waring”.