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layout: default
title: Apache Buildr
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Apache Buildr is a build system for Java-based applications, including support for Scala, Groovy and a growing number of JVM languages and tools.  We wanted something that's simple and intuitive to use, so we only need to tell it what to do, and it takes care of the rest.  But also something we can easily extend for those one-off tasks, with a language that's a joy to use.  And of course, we wanted it to be fast, reliable and have outstanding dependency management.


h2(#why).  Why Buildr Rocks

"Daniel Spiewak":http://www.codecommit.com/blog:

bq. If you think about it, the question isn’t “Why use Buildr?”, it’s really “Why use anything else?” The advantages afforded by Buildr are so substantial, I really can’t see myself going with any other tool, at least not when I have a choice.

"Tristan Juricek":http://tristanhunt.com/:

bq. That’s still the strongest sell: it builds everything I need, and as I’ve needed more, I just got things working without a lot of fuss.

"Matthieu Riou":http://offthelip.org/:

bq. We used to rely on Ant, with a fairly extensive set of scripts. It worked but was expensive to maintain. The biggest mistake afterward was to migrate to Maven2. I could write pages of rants explaining all the problems we ran into and we still ended up with thousands of lines of XML.

"Martin Grotzke":http://www.javakaffee.de/blog/:

bq. The positive side effect for me as a java user is that I learn a little ruby, and that’s easy but lots of fun… :-)

"Ijonas Kisselbach":http://twitter.com/ijonas/statuses/4134103928:

bq. I've cleaned up & migrated the Vamosa build process from 768 lines of Ant build.xml to 28 lines of Buildr.

h2(#what).  What You Get

* A simple way to specify projects, and build large projects out of smaller sub-projects.
* Pre-canned tasks that require the least amount of configuration, keeping the build script DRY and simple.
* Compiling, copying and filtering resources, JUnit/TestNG test cases, APT source code generation, Javadoc and more.
* A dependency mechanism that only builds what has changed since the last release.
* A drop-in replacement for Maven 2.0, Buildr uses the same file layout, artifact specifications, local and remote repositories.
* All your Ant tasks are belong to us! Anything you can do with Ant, you can do with Buildr.
* No overhead for building "plugins" or configuration. Just write new tasks or functions.
* Buildr is Ruby all the way down.  No one-off task is too demanding when you write code using variables, functions and objects.
* Simple way to upgrade to new versions.
* Did we mention fast?

So let's get started.  You can "read the documentation online":quick_start.html, or "download the PDF":buildr.pdf.


h2(#news).  What's New

Highlights from Buildr 1.5.5 (2017-12-06)
* Fixed:  The concatenation extension released as part of 1.5.4 changed the way zip archives were
          constructed so that entries for some intermediate directories were elided. For most consumers
          of zip files this had no impact but some tools require the entries during scanning. (i.e. Older
          versions of Jruby that loaded ruby scripts from within a jar).

Highlights from Buildr 1.5.4 (2017-11-29)
* Added:  Findbugs Addon: Upgrade to version 3.0.1 of findbugs.
* Added:  GPG Addon: Add boolean configuration setting `project.gpg` that can be set to false via
          `project.gpg = false` to avoid signing and uploading packages. This is useful when some
          projects are not intended for publishing.
* Fixed:  JaCoCo Addon: Projects that have jacoco disabled will no longer appear in the JaCoCo reports.
* Change: JaCoCo Addon: Update JaCoCo version to 0.7.9.
* Fixed:  BUILDR-733 - Escape classpath entries in the pathing jar manifest. Submitted by Glenn Croes.
* Fixed:  Ensure that the pom is attached to the jar artifact with empty classifier rather than the last
          artifact of a type defined. Otherwise a project that defines multiple artifacts of the same type
          (i.e. `package(:jar)` and `package(:jar, :classifier => :gwt)`) could have the pom named after
          the package with the classifier rather than the package without a classifer. (i.e. the pom could
          be incorrectly defined as `mypackage-1.0.0-gwt.pom` rather than `mypackage-1.0.0.pom`).
* Added:  GWT Addon: Add support for GWT 2.8.2 release and make it the default version unless otherwise specified.
* Added:  BUILDR-732 - Support bnd version 2.1.0 or more. Submitted By Eric Bruneton.
* Added:  Support to compiling Kotlin
* Added:  New way to concatenate file contents when merging several archives together.
* Added:  New way to transform file contents when merging several archives together.
* Added:  Support both Jetty 6 and Jetty 9 as addons. Added integration tests to cover their use.

Highlights from Buildr 1.5.3 (2017-05-17)
* Change: Add support for gwt 2.8.1 to gwt addon.
* Fixed:  Avoid error "undefined local variable or method `pom'" when invoking the `JarTask` without it being
  registered through the `package` helper`. Reported by Dieter Vrancken.

This is a partial list -- see the "CHANGELOG":CHANGELOG for full details.

h2(#notices).  Credits & Notices

!http://www.apache.org/images/asf-logo.gif(A project of the Apache Software Foundation)!:http://www.apache.org

The Apache Software Foundation is a non-profit organization, consider "sponsoring":http://www.apache.org/foundation/sponsorship.html and check the "thanks":http://www.apache.org/foundation/thanks.html page.

"ColorCons":http://www.mouserunner.com/Spheres_ColoCons1_Free_Icons.html, copyright of Ken Saunders.  "DejaVu fonts":http://dejavu.sourceforge.net, copyright of Bitstream, Inc.

Community member quotes from a thread on "Stack Overflow":http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1015525/why-use-buildr-instead-of-ant-or-maven/1055864.

Developed with !http://www.jetbrains.com/ruby/features/ruby_banners/ruby1/ruby120x30_white.gif(Developed with RubyMine)!:http://www.jetbrains.com/ruby/features?utm_source=RubyMineUser&utm_medium=Banner&utm_campaign=RubyMine