I’m on a hot streak tonight… Another comon problem that I have had to solve recently is how to attach a build number to files that are being generated out of an Ant build script.

We have developed a versioning scheme (inspired by http://geekswithblogs.net/emanish/archive/2006/09/25/92219.aspx) for our releases where our release are named .... So a valid build number might be 1.18.2.1077. This means it belongs to the first major release of the software, the eighteenth minor version, it is the second attempt at a release for this minor version (usually bug fixes), and it is related to the SVN revision number 1077. Any time we are doing a build we are tagging in our Subversion repository to keep the build number tied to the tag. When I build a release, I want my artifacts to look like to look like this: app-1.18.2.1077.ear.

There are a few ways to do this, One way that I considered was to just include a property or Subversion tag in the build.properties file. But I did not want to maintain it and I have always loathed the auto tags that were available in CVS.

My second option was to use the Ant task. While this will probably work, I have varying degrees of success using the Java SVN library, especially when connecting to Subversion over SSH as we are doing for this application.

So, I decided to go with using the task in conjunction with svn info and svnversion to set the full.build.version property to the current release number. This assumes that the repository checked out is of the format svn://REPO_NAME/tags/.. 

 
<exec outputproperty="build.current.revision" executable="svnversion">
         <arg line="-n -c" />
         <redirector>
           <outputfilterchain>
             <tokenfilter>
                 <replaceregex pattern="^[0-9]*:?" replace="" flags="g"/>
             </tokenfilter>
          </outputfilterchain>
        </redirector>
</exec>
<exec outputproperty="build.current.version" executable="svn">
  <arg line="info" />
  <redirector>
  <outputfilterchain>
  <linecontainsregexp><regexp pattern="^URL:" /></linecontainsregexp>
   <tokenfilter>
     <replaceregex pattern=".*\/([^\/]+)$" replace="\1" flags="g"/>
   </tokenfilter>
  </outputfilterchain>
</redirector>
</exec>

<property name="full.build.version" value="${build.current.version}.${build.current.revision}" />

I’m sure that I could have gotten the revision from the svn info rather than svnversion, saving a command, but I wasn’t inspired enough to do it. Maybe when I have more time.