Running an ANT task

ANT is a popular build automation tool that provides a great degree of flexibility. It also provides tasks, such as echo and touch, that are not available in Maven. There might be advantages in combining ANT tasks with Maven to achieve certain goals, though it is best to avoid it until it's inevitable.

Maven provides a mechanism to run arbitrary ANT tasks by way of the Maven AntRun plugin. Let us see how to use this to run an ANT task in our project.

How to do it...

1. Open a project for which you want to run ANT tasks (project-with-ant).
2. Add the following plugin configuration to the pom file:

        <plugin>
           <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
           <version>1.8</version>
           <executions>
             <execution>
               <phase>package</phase>
               <configuration>
                 <target>
                     <echo message="Calling ant task in package phase"/>
      ...