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:
- Hierarchy crawl — BFS over
<import> / <include> / <ant> / <subant> links to find every
build file that may need manipulating.
- 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.
- Correlation — group findings by
groupId:artifactId, flag version conflicts.
- Reconciliation — resolve tokenised versions (
${...}, @TOKEN@) to concrete values by
following Ant's substitution chains.
- Discovery report — emit a
discovery-report.json of every coordinate candidate found, with
provenance, conflicts, and reconciliation (no PME/GME equivalent).
- Align — POST coordinates to a DA lookup service and compute each project's publish version.
- Rewrite — write the aligned versions back into the build files (formatting-preserving).
- 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.
