Section 8.1. Creating WAR Archives

8.1. Creating WAR Archives

The war task is an extension of the jar task, and it compresses Web applications into .war files, with special handling for files that should end up in the WEB-INF/lib, WEB-INF/classes or WEB-INF directories on the server. For example, say you have this directory layout after you build your project:

war |____output |        login.class |        logout.class |         |____source      |    login.xml      |          |____html               welcome.xml

The build file in Example 8-1 will create the .war file you need to deploy this application, placing the .class files in the WEB-INF/classes directory, renaming login.xml web.xml and placing it in WEB-INF, and so on.

Example 8-1. Creating a war file (ch08/war/build.xml)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> <project default="main" basedir=".">        <property name="bin" value="output" />      <property name="src" value="source" />      <target name="main" >         <war destfile="login.war" webxml="${src}/login.xml">             <fileset dir="${src}/html"/>             <classes dir="${bin}"/>         </war>     </target>      </project>

Here's what this build file looks like at work:

%ant Buildfile: build.xml main:       [war] Building war: /home/steven/ant/ch08/war/login.war BUILD SUCCESSFUL Total time: 2 seconds

That creates the .war file. Besides packaging the files specified, Ant supplies a default manifest file, Manifest.mf, in the resulting .war file, which contains these contents:

Manifest-Version: 1.0 Ant-Version: Apache Ant 1.6.1 Created-By: 1.4.2_03-b02 (Sun Microsystems Inc.)

After you create your .war file, you can deploy it by copying it to your web server's deployment directory, such as to the webapps directory in Tomcat.

The attributes of the war task appear in Table 8-1.

The war task is a shortcut for specifying the particular layout of a .war file. The same thing can be accomplished using the prefix and fullpath attributes of zipfilesets in a zip or jar task.

Table 8-1. The war task's attributes

Attribute	Description	Required	Default
basedir	Specifies the source directory for files to include in the compressed file.	No
compress	Specifies you want to not only store data but compress it.	No	TRue
defaultexcludes	Specifies if you want to use default excludes or not. Set to yes/no.	No	Default excludes are used.
destfile	Specifies the WAR file you want to create.	Exactly one of destfile or warfile.
duplicate	Specifies what to do if a duplicate file is found. Valid values are add, preserve, and fail.	No	add
encoding	Specifies the character encoding to use for filenames in the WAR file.	No	UTF8
excludes	Specifes the patterns matching files to exclude, as a comma- or space-separated list.	No
excludesfile	Specifes the name of a file where each line is a pattern matching files to exclude.	No
filesonly	Specifies you want to store only file entries.	No	false
includes	Specifes the patterns matching files to include, as a comma- or space-separated list.	No
includesfile	Specifes the name of a file where each line is a pattern matching files to include.	No
keepcompression	Preserves the compression as it has been in archives you're compressing instead of using the compress attribute. Available since Ant 1.6.	No	false
manifest	Specifies the manifest file to use in the compressed file.	No
update	Specifies whether you want to update or overwrite the target file if it exists.	No	false
warfile	Deprecated. Use destfile. Specifies the WAR file you want to create.	Exactly one of destfile or warfile.
webxml	Specifies the deployment descriptor you want to use. Will be deployed to WEB-INF/web.xml.	Yes, unless update is set to true.

The war task can contain elements like fileset and zipfileset to specify what files to include in the .war file. This task can contain these elements to specify where you want various files to go:

• Files contained in the webinf element end up in WEB-INF

• Files contained in the classes element end up in WEB-INF/classes

• Files contained in the lib element end up in WEB-INF/lib

• Files contained in the metainf files end up in META-INF