Question

I’m working on a project to develop a custom Ant task.

As part of automated acceptance testing, I’d like to execute Ant from JUnit (the opposite of the usual desire) and pass it a string containing certain build XML to be tested via a command line param or stdin or pipe or something like that, rather than referring it to a buildfile on disk.

Is there any feasible way to do this?

Answer 1

Ant expects a file as input. You can however use the -f parameter to specify a tempfile as input:

$ cat <<EOF > tmp1.xml
<project name="demo" default="hello">
<target name="hello">
<echo>hello world</echo>
</target>
</project>
EOF

$ ant -f tmp1.xml

Obviously from Junit you’re more likely the write the XML from Java 🙂