Ant: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition

Deploying with SCP

Another deployment task, available since Ant 1.6, is the scp task, which copies a file or FileSet to or from a remote machine running the SSH daemon. This task is an optional one, and you need jsch.jar in the Ant lib directory to use it (you can get jsch.jar at http://www.jcraft.com/jsch/index.html).

This task is handy for deployment. For example, here's how to deploy a single file to a remote host (any host you connect to must be listed in your knownhosts file unless you specifically set the trust attribute to yes or true):

<scp file="Project.jar"  
    todir="user:[e-mail]:/home/steven/cgi-bin"/>

You can use the password attribute explicitly to set the password:

<scp file="Project.jar"  
    todir="[e-mail]:/home/steven/cgi-bin""  
    password="password"/>

Here's how to copy a remote file to a local machine:

<scp file="user:[e-mail]:/home/steven/cgi-bin/Project.jar" 
    todir="${archive}"/>

Here's how to copy a set of files using a fileset:

<scp todir="user:[e-mail]:/home/steven/source">
    <fileset dir="${src}">
        <include name="**/*.java"/>
    </fileset>
</scp>

Example 8-3 gives a complete example build file using the scp task for deployment. (It uses the remote machine's IP address instead of naming the remote server.)

Example 8-3. Using scp (ch08/scp/build.xml)

<?xml version="1.0" ?> <project default="main"> <property name="message" value="Deploying the .jar file." /> <property name="src" location="source" /> <property name="output" ...