Ant - Compress everything | OpenWritings.net

The Ant build file below will compress everything from the current directory into myProjectName_YYYY-MM-DD_HH.MM.SS.tar.gz, except files with the format myProjectName_*.tar.gz and the db directory.

<project basedir="." default="build" name="myProjectName">
 
  <tstamp><format property="DAY_TIME_NOW" pattern="yyyy-MM-dd_HH.mm.ss" /></tstamp>
 
  <target name="pack_code" description="Packing everything.">
    <tar compression="gzip" destfile="${ant.project.name}_${DAY_TIME_NOW}.tar.gz" 
      basedir="." 
      excludes="db/**, **/${ant.project.name}_*.tar.gz"  
    />
  </target>
 
  <!-- Or compress multiple specific files. -->
  <target name="compress_multiple_files">
    <tar compression="gzip" destfile="/path/to/my_archive.tar.gz">
      <tarfileset dir=".">
        <include name="my_file1.txt"/>
        <include name="my_file2.txt"/>
      </tarfileset>
    </tar>
  </target>
 
</project>

Note:

Don't use base="." attribute in <tar> if the base directory have a directory that contains a lot of files(>50 000). Otherwise, it will be very slow.

Ant

About the author

Xuan Ngo is the founder of OpenWritings.net. He currently lives in Montreal, Canada. He loves to write about programming and open source subjects.