Nant: Populating templates
One of the common tasks that we need to do on every project I've worked on is ensure that we can create a web.config file for the different environments that we need to deploy our application to.
Nant has quite a neat task called 'expandproperties' which allows us to do this quite easily.
In our build file we would have the following:
build-file.build
<property name ="configFile" value="${environment}.properties" readonly="true"/>
<if test="${not file::exists(configFile)}">
<fail message="Configuration file '${configFile}' could not be found." />
</if>
<include buildfile ="${configFile}" />
<target name="GenerateConfigFiles">
<foreach item="File" property="TemplateFile">
<in>
<items>
<include name="ProjectDirectory/**.template"/>
</items>
</in>
<do>
<copy file="${TemplateFile}" tofile="${string::replace(TemplateFile,'.template','')}" overwrite="true">
<filterchain>
<expandproperties />
</filterchain>
</copy>
</do>
</foreach>
</target>There would be corresponding '.template' and '.properties' files containing the various variables we want to set, like so:
dev.properties
<project> <property name="SomeHost" value="http://my-host.com:8080"/> </project>
web.template.config
<?xml version="1.0"?>
...
<configuration>
<appSettings>
<add key="SomeHost="${SomeHost}"/>
</appSettings>
</configuration>
...We would call the build file like so:
nant -buildfile:build-file.build GenerateConfigFiles -D:environment=dev
We can then change that 'environment' variable depending which one we need to generate the configuration files for.
