Introducing empty Apache Ant Build for WordPress

Welcome and say hello to empty. empty is a bunch of ANT Build Tasks for WordPress plugin developers that help automate the build thanks to Apache Ant

Why ANT not PHING?

Go ask Google that - there are plenty of conversations elsewhere on ANT vs PHING. It’s really a personal choice.

Ant, Phing, Grunt.js, make are all build tools for developers. Ant is a popular tool, free and widely used. It’s commonly used for Java but can fit in with other code and projects.

Why not Grunt.js?

Well yes, experimentation is good - Grunt.js may fit in there somewhere if ANT tasks for minify aren’t simple.

What’s in empty

empty supports a number of commonly needed task features like

• create a compressed .zip of all your project files
• copy the zip to your DropBox folder
• works with a Mac and Windows
• currently supports 4 dev, test and staging environments
• basic edit / replace by tags of your readme markdown file
• saves your readme.md as readme.txt to the distribution .zip

How to Get started with empty?

Save all the files into your WordPress plugin project directory Make sure you have Java and Apache Ant installed 🙂

Start by editing build.properties and enter the name of your plugin.

Then open Terminal or your CLI editor .. and type

ant

If it’s going well .. you’ll see this -

Damiens-MacBook-Pro:empty damien$ ant
Buildfile: /wp-content/plugins/empty/build.xml

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 1 second
Damiens-MacBook-Pro:empty damien$

Build your plugin compress .zip

This will ..

• delete the temp build folders
• make the build directories
• copy all the required project files to a new folder
• zip the finished project

Type

ant make

and you’ll see

Damiens-MacBook-Pro:empty damien$ ant make
Buildfile: /Volumes/Proust/Sites/dev/wp-content/plugins/empty/build.xml

build.clean:
[delete] Deleting directory /Volumes/Proust/Sites/dev/wp-content/plugins/empty/build
[delete] Deleting directory /Volumes/Proust/Sites/dev/wp-content/plugins/empty/dist

makedir:
[mkdir] Created dir: /Volumes/Proust/Sites/dev/wp-content/plugins/empty/build
[mkdir] Created dir: /Volumes/Proust/Sites/dev/wp-content/plugins/empty/build/empty
[mkdir] Created dir: /Volumes/Proust/Sites/dev/wp-content/plugins/empty/dist

make:
[copy] Copying 6 files to /Volumes/Proust/Sites/dev/wp-content/plugins/empty/build/empty
[copy] Copying 2 files to /Volumes/Proust/Sites/dev/wp-content/plugins/empty/build/empty/css
[copy] Copied 1 empty directory to 1 empty directory under /Volumes/Proust/Sites/dev/wp-content/plugins/empty/build/empty/js

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 0 seconds
Damiens-MacBook-Pro:empty damien$

Meet the author

Damien Saunders
An experienced management consultant and business leader interested in digital transformation, product centred design and scaled agile. If I'm not writing about living with UCTD (an autoimmune disease), I'm probably listening to music, reading a book or learning more about wine.
Find our more about me.