ant-manipulator

A command-line tool to align versions and coordinates in Apache Ant projects, modelled on the Maven POM Manipulation Extension (PME) and its Gradle sibling, the Gradle Manipulator (GME).

Like PME and GME, it exists to support rebuilding large numbers of pre-existing projects in a cleanroom environment: discover what a build publishes, look the coordinates up against an external source of truth (a Dependency Analyzer / DA service), compute the version each artifact should be published under, and rewrite the build files in place — preserving formatting.

Why a separate tool for Ant?

Ant has no canonical project model. A single build.xml can produce many artifacts, versions live behind chains of ${property} / @token@ substitutions, and the same version literal appears both in version-defining sites and in prose. This tool reuses Ant's own ProjectHelper/Project to parse build files and expand properties, then applies a PME-style pipeline on top.

Pipeline

The stages mirror PME's ManipulationManager flow:

1. Hierarchy crawl — BFS over <import> / <include> / <ant> / <subant> links to find every build file that may need manipulating.
2. GAV resolution — multi-GAV-with-provenance resolution from pom templates, ivy.xml, Maven-1 project.xml, properties, and -D overrides. A subdirectory that has its own build.xml is only considered when step 1's crawl actually reached it — a self-contained Ant project bundled alongside the real sources but never executed from the root (e.g. an abandoned sandbox proposal) is excluded, rather than being mistaken for a real artifact or the execution root.
3. Correlation — group findings by groupId:artifactId, flag version conflicts.
4. Reconciliation — resolve tokenised versions (${...}, @TOKEN@) to concrete values by following Ant's substitution chains.
5. Discovery report — emit a discovery-report.json of every coordinate candidate found, with provenance, conflicts, and reconciliation (no PME/GME equivalent).
6. Align — POST coordinates to a DA lookup service and compute each project's publish version.
7. Rewrite — write the aligned versions back into the build files (formatting-preserving).
8. Alignment report — emit an alignmentReport.json in PME's own JSON shape, so PNC/Repour consume Ant Manipulator's GAV changes exactly like PME's and GME's.

Module layout

The build is a multi-module Maven reactor, mirroring PME's structure:

Module	Contents
common	Shared value types, the PME-style VersionIncrementer (version math), and the Dependency Analyzer REST translator. Request/response model types come from da:reports-model so the wire format stays consistent with PME and GME.
core	The Ant-tree manipulators — GAV resolution/correlation, version reconciliation, the formatting-preserving rewriter — plus the alignment report.
cli	The picocli entry point; builds the self-contained (shaded) executable jar.
integration-test	End-to-end tests that drive the assembled pipeline against fixture Ant projects.

Requirements

• JDK 17+ to build (Spotless requires Java 17). Code (main and test) targets Java 11.
• Maven 3.8+

Building

mvn clean package

This produces a self-contained (shaded) executable jar at cli/target/ant-manipulation-cli.jar.

Documentation

Full usage, CLI flags, -D property reference, and feature guides are on the documentation site.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.