klaasprause.com

ivy4r using Apache Ivy with Ruby

Our company uses Apache Ivy for dependency management and tracks all our artifacts including EARs and WARs with Ivy. Ivy is great and provides a lot of great features but depends on Apache Ant. Making builds with Ant is a pain, because Ant is no programming language and misses a lot features needed for bigger builds including deployments of servers for testing and stuff like this.

We are using Ruby on some projects and really wanted to give Apache Buildr a try. The problem with buildr is that it plugs ifself into the maven dependency management. Downgrading dependencies back to maven was not an option, so we needed a way to use Ivy with Buildr.

ivy4r to the rescue

To integrate ivy into buildr ivy4r was created. Ivy4r is a wrapper around Ivy using antwrap and provides a pure ruby interface to ivy. The interface provides all Ant tasks that can be useful. On top of this two extensions are provided one for buildr one for rake. By requiring the appropriate extension ivy can be integrated seamless into the build process using the standard way buildr extensions are configured.

For more information check out the ivy4r documentation on github or rubyforge:

• http://github.com/klaas1979/ivy4r/tree/master
• http://hamburgrb.rubyforge.org/ivy4r/