Welcome to the official Ivy documentation.

What is Ivy?

Ivy is a tool for managing (recording, tracking, resolving and reporting) project dependencies. It is characterized by the following:

1. flexibility and configurability - Ivy is essentially process agnostic and is not tied to any methodology or structure. Instead it provides the necessary flexibility and configurability to be adapted to a broad range of dependency management and build processes.
2. tight integration with Apache Ant - while available as a standalone tool, Ivy works particularly well with Apache Ant providing a number of powerful Ant tasks ranging from dependency resolution to dependency reporting and publication.

Ivy is open source and released under a very permissive Apache License.

Ivy has a lot of powerful features, the most popular and useful being its flexibility, integration with ant, and its strong transitive dependencies management engine.

The transitive dependencies management is a feature which let you get dependencies of your dependencies, transitively. In order to address this problematic ivy needs to find metadata about your modules, usually in an ivy file. To find these metadata and your dependencies artifacts (usually jars), Ivy can be configured to use a lot of different repositories.

About this doc

This documentation has been migrated from the old Ivy web site hosted by Jayasoft, feel free to report any problem on the mailing-lists.

If you browse this documentation from your installation of Ivy, you can also check the online version for latest updates.

You can also browse this documentation offline either by downloading the documentation distribution, or by checking out the doc directory from svn. This documentation uses xooki as documentation engine, so you can very easily edit it and submit patches when you browse it from source.

A printer-friendly version of this whole documentation is also provided for your convenience.

Since Ivy 2.0.0-alpha-2, we keep an online history of the documentation. You can thus browse history versions online (in the history menu in the web site) and even check the trunk version documentation currently in development.

For earlier versions, we suggest downloading the documentation to browse the documentation corresponding to the version you use. The full history of Ivy versions with corresponding links for download is available in the history menu on the web site.

Other places to go

Check Ivy features.
Read our FAQ.
Ask for help on our mailing lists.
Report bug or feature request in our issue tracking system.
Check external tools and resources.

Overview

This documentation is decomposed in 3 main parts:

• Tutorials
The tutorials is the best way to begin to play with ivy. You will easily and quickly learn the basics of Ivy.

• Reference
The reference documentation gives you all the details of Ivy.
The introduction part is particularly useful: it defines some vocabulary, explains main concepts such as dependency resolvers and patterns, and give an overview on how ivy works internally.
It's also in the reference doc that you will find all you always dreamed to know about ivy settings, ivy files, and ivy use (especially with ant).

• Developer doc
The developers's doc is useful for users who would like to extend Ivy or build it from source. It's also the documentation used by the Ivy team, so you will also find information about how we make releases.

---

Announcement

Jan 20, 2009 - The Ivy project is pleased to announce its 2.0.0 release.
This is the first non-beta release of Ivy under Apache.

Ivy is a tool for managing (recording, tracking, resolving and
reporting) project dependencies, characterized by flexibility,
configurability, and tight integration with Apache Ant.

Key features of the 2.0.0 release are
* enhanced Maven2 compatibility, with several bug fixes and more
  pom features covered
* improved cache management, including dynamic revision caching
  with fine grain TTL
* improved concurrency support with cache locking and atomic publish
* namespace aware validation, allowing to use validation with
  extra attributes
* new 'packager' resolver added
* better and more homogeneous relative paths handling
* better support for local builds
* numerous bug fixes as documented in Jira and in the release notes

We encourage all users of Ivy to update to this new version.

Issues should be reported to:
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/IVY

Download the 2.0.0 release at:
http://ant.apache.org/ivy/download.cgi

More information can be found on the Ivy website:
http://ant.apache.org/ivy/

Regards,
Maarten Coene

Apache Ivy 2.0.0 Release Notes

CONTENTS
1. What is Apache Ivy?
2. Status of this release
3. Major Changes in this Release
4. Migrating from Jayasoft Ivy to Apache Ivy
5. How to Get Involved
6. How to Report Issues
7. Committers and Contributors for this release
8. List of Changes in this Release

1. What is Apache Ivy?

Apache Ivy is a tool for managing (recording, tracking, resolving and reporting) project dependencies.
It is characterized by the following:

1. flexibility and configurability
Apache Ivy is essentially process agnostic and is not tied to any
methodology or structure.
Instead it provides the necessary flexibility and configurability
to be adapted to a broad range of dependency management and build
processes.
2. tight integration with Apache Ant
while available as a standalone tool, Apache Ivy works particularly well
with Apache Ant providing a number of powerful Ant tasks ranging
from dependency resolution to dependency reporting and publication.

2. Status of this release

This is the first official release made since Ivy has moved to the Apache Software Foundation. We strongly encourage the use of this new version instead of the older 1.4.1 version, which has not been produced within the Apache Software Foundation.

3. Major Changes in this Release

This section describes what has changed between version 1.4.1 and this version of Apache Ivy which may cause incompatibilities. For a full list of detailed changes, please refer to CHANGES.txt file.

This new version of Apache Ivy is almost fully compatible with 1.4 version as long as you do not use custom plugins: Ivy API has changed, but not its behavior. Some tasks and configuration elements have been renamed, but the old versions are still available, they are only deprecated (you will see deprecated warnings).

3.1. Java Package Name Changes

All of the Ivy Java package names have changed in Apache Ivy. They now start with org.apache rather than fr.jayasoft. There have been other changes as well. Important refactorings have done on the source code to ease the understanding of Ivy internal architecture by new developers.

A class named org.apache.ivy.Ivy14 is provided with an API compatible with the fr.jayasoft.Ivy class of Ivy 1.4.1, to ease migration to this new version.

3.2. Configuration replaced by Settings

Configuration used to have two meanings in prior Ivy versions, causing some confusion with new users. To avoid this confusion, Apache Ivy calls settings instead of configuration the files used to customize Ivy. Configuration is still used for module configurations.

Besides the changes in the documentation, this renaming also imply a modification in settings files, which now use ivysettings as root element instead of ivyconf, and settings instead of conf element to define top level defaults (such as defaultCache, ...). Previous names have been deprecated, so previous settings files can still be used, but you will see a deprecation warning.

3.3. Public resolver in default settings is now ibiblio in m2 compatible mode

In previous versions Ivy used to use the ivyrep resolver as default public resolver, but ivyrep is no longer maintained, while maven 2 repository on ibiblio is growing rapidly.

Since Ivy is compatible with maven 2 repository, defaulting to the ibiblio maven 2 repository makes more sense.

If you have any issue of backward compatibility with these new settings, you can simply set the following ant property before loading the settings (implicitly or explicitly):

ivy.14.compatible=true

3.4. Relative paths resolution

Relative paths resolution in Ivy used to be resolved against the current directory.

In 2.0, relative path resolution is done like this:
* In an Ivy file, paths are relative to the Ivy file itself (the only possible path in an Ivy file is for configurations declaration inclusion)
* In settings files, paths for file inclusion (namely properties file loading and settings inclusion) are relative to the directory in which the settings file is located. All other paths must be absolute unless explicitly noted.
* In Ivy Ant tasks and Ivy parameters or options, paths are relative to Ivy base directory, which when called from Ant is the same as your Ant basedir.

This may break your dependency resolution if you used to use relative paths for configuration file inclusion.

3.5 Ivyrep ivyroot attribute is now mandatory

If you still use the ivyrep resolver, you will need to provide an ivyroot. To restore the previous behavior, use ivyroot="http://ivyrep.jayasoft.org/". Since Ivyrep is not maintained anymore, we recommend moving away from this repository anyway.

3.6 alwaysCheckExactRevision now defaults to false

This property common to many resolvers is used to tell the resolver if the raw revision should be tested even when the revision is dynamic. This is used in very few use cases, so we decided to change the default to false.

If you want to set the default to true, set 'ivy.default.always.check.exact.revision' to 'true' before loading Ivy settings.

4. Migrating from Jayasoft Ivy to Apache Ivy

Besides what is stated in "3. Major Changes in this Release" Apache Ivy is fully compatible with Jayasoft Ivy as long as you do not use custom plugins. This means that you can use Apache Ivy as a drop in replacement of Jayasoft Ivy
in most cases.

However due to the the renaming of configuration files to settings files, we strongly suggest to update your configuration files:
- rename the files called ivyconf*.xml in ivysettings*.xml
- rename 'ivyconf' element in 'ivysettings'
- rename 'conf' element of those settings file in 'settings'

We also suggest using the new org.apache.ivy.ant package name for the antlib declaration.

Migrating custom plugins can be done by using the org.apache.ivy.Ivy14 class instead of fr.jayasoft.ivy.Ivy, and reorganizing your imports to reflect the changes in the package names.

5. How to Get Involved

The Apache Ivy project really needs and appreciates any contributions, including documentation help, source code and feedback. If you are interested in contributing, please visit http://ant.apache.org/ivy/get-involved.html.

6. How to Report Issues

The Apache Ivy project uses JIRA for issue tracking. Please report any issues you find at http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/IVY

7. Committers and Contributors for this Release

Here is the list of people who have contributed source code and documentation to this release. Many thanks to all of them, and also to the whole Ivy community contributing ideas and feedback, and promoting the use of Ivy. The list would be too long, but Ivy couldn't be what it is without you!


Committers
Maarten Coene
Xavier Hanin
Nicolas Lalevee
Gilles Scokart

Contributors
Archie Cobbs
Patrick Woodworth

For the list of people who have contributed since Ivy inception, see CHANGES.txt file.

8. List of Changes in this Release

For a full release history of Ivy see the file CHANGES.txt

For details about the following changes, check our JIRA install at http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ivy

List of changes since Ivy 2.0.0-rc2:
- IMPROVEMENT: Extend packager resolver to allow arbitrary ant tasks in build instructions (IVY-994) (thanks to Archie Cobbs)
- IMPROVEMENT: Ivy Standalone setting to overwrite publications (IVY-976)
- IMPROVEMENT: Support useOrigin for artifacts with a set url attribute (IVY-965) (thanks to alex322)

- FIX: NullPointerException at PomModuleDescriptorBuilder.addDependency (IVY-995)
- FIX: Log levels aren't respected in certain cases using the standalone functionality (IVY-960) (thanks to Patrick Woodworth)
- FIX: NPE in LogReportOutputter (IVY-961)
- FIX: NullPointerException when resolving module wihout revision in the pattern (IVY-980)
- FIX: IO problem while parsing ivy file (Resetting to invalid mark) (IVY-975)
- FIX: Cannot parse maven2 poms containing an UTF-8 BOM
- FIX: Files with non-latin symbols fail to download (IVY-962)

---

The best way to learn is to practice! That's what the ivy tutorials will help you to do, to discover some of the great ivy features.

Here is the very first tutorial, it doesn't even require to install Ivy, and should not take more than 30 seconds if you already have ant and a jdk properly installed:

• make sure you have ant 1.6.0 or greater and a jdk properly installed
• copy this build file in an empty directory on your local filesystem (and make sure you name it build.xml)
• open a console in this directory and run "ant". That's it!

If you have any trouble, check the FAQ, it may be related to your internet connection (proxy anyone?).

OK, you've seen how easy it is to make your first step with ivy? Go ahead with the other tutorials, but before make sure you have properly installed ivy and downloaded the tutorials sources (included in all ivy distributions, in the src/example directory).

The following tutorials are available:

• Quick Start
guide you through your very first steps with ivy.
• Adjusting default settings
give you a better understanding of the default settings and show you how to customize them to your needs.
• Multiple Resolvers
teach you how to configure Ivy to find its dependencies in multiple places.
• Dual Resolver
help you configure ivy to find ivy files in one place and artifacts in another.
• Project dependenciesProject Dependencies
a very first step toward using Ivy in a multi project environment.
• Using Ivy in multiple projects environment
a more complex example demonstrating the use of Ant+Ivy in a multi project environment.
• Using Ivy Module Configurations
show how to use configurations in ivy file to define set of artifacts.
• Building a repository
show how to build your own enterprise repository.

---

In this example, we will see one of the easiest way to use Ivy. With no specific settings, Ivy uses the maven 2 repository to resolve the dependencies you declare in an Ivy file. Let's have a look at the content of the files involved.

You'll find this tutorial's sources in the ivy distribution in the src/example/hello-ivy directory.

The ivy.xml file

This file is used to describe the dependencies of the project on other libraries.
Here is the sample:

<ivy-module version="2.0">
    <info organisation="apache" module="hello-ivy"/>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency org="commons-lang" name="commons-lang" rev="2.0"/>
        <dependency org="commons-cli" name="commons-cli" rev="1.0"/>
    </dependencies>
</ivy-module>

The format of this file should pretty easy to understand, but let's give some details about what is declared here. First, the root element ivy-module, with the version attribute used to tell Ivy which version of Ivy this file use.

Then there is an info tag, which is used to give information about the module for which we are defining dependencies. Here we define only the organization and module name, you are free to choose whatever you want for them, but we recommend avoiding spaces.

Finally, the dependencies section let you define dependencies. Here this module depends on two libraries: commons-lang and commons-cli. As you can see we use the org and name attribute to define the organization and module name of the dependencies we need. The rev attribute is used to specify the revision of the module you depend on.

To know what to put in these attributes, you need to know the exact information for the libraries you depend on. Ivy uses the maven 2 repository by default. We recommend you use mvnrepository.com to look for the module you want. Once you find it, you will have the details on how to declare the dependency in a maven POM. For instance:

<dependency>
    <groupId>commons-lang</groupId>
    <artifactId>commons-lang</artifactId>
    <version>2.0</version>
</dependency>

To convert this into an Ivy dependency declaration, all you have to do is use the groupId as organization, the artifactId as module name, and the version as revision. That's what we did for the dependencies in this tutorial, that is commons-lang and commons-cli. Note that having commons-lang and commons-cli as organization is not the best example of what the organization should be. It would be better to use org.apache, org.apache.commons or org.apache.commons.lang. However, this is how these modules are identified in the maven 2 repository, so the simplest way to get them is to use the details as is (you will see in Building a repository that you can use namespaces to redefine these names if you want something cleaner).

If you want more details on what you can do in Ivy files, you can have a look at the Ivy files reference documentation.

The build.xml file

The corresponding build file contains a set of targets, allowing to resolve dependencies declared in the Ivy file, to compile and run the sample code, produce a report of dependency resolution, and clean the cache or the project.
You can use the standard "ant -p" to get the list of available targets. Feel free to have a look at the whole file, but here is the part relevant to dependency resolution:

<project xmlns:ivy="antlib:org.apache.ivy.ant" name="hello-ivy" default="run">
    
    ...
    
    <!-- ================================= 
          target: resolve              
         ================================= -->
    <target name="resolve" description="--> retrieve dependencies with ivy">
        <ivy:retrieve />
    </target>
</project>

As you can see, it's very easy to call Ivy to resolve and retrieve dependencies: all you need if Ivy is properly installed is to define an XML namespace in your Ant file (xmlns:ivy="antlib:org.apache.ivy.ant"). Then all the Ivy ant tasks will be available in this namespace.

Here we use only one task: the retrieve task. With no attributes, it will use default settings and look for a file named ivy.xml for dependency definition. That's exactly what we want, so we need nothing more than that.

Note that in this case we define a "resolve" target and call the retrieve task. This may sound confusing, actually the retrieve task performs a resolve (which resolves dependencies and downloads them to a cache) followed by a retrieve (a copy of those file in a local project directory). Check the How does it work ? page for details about that.

Running the project

Ok, now that we have seen the files involved, let's run the sample to see what happens. Open a shell (or command line) window, and enter the hello-ivy example directory.
Then, at the command prompt, run 'ant':

What happened ?

Without any settings, Ivy retrieves files from the maven 2 repository. That's what happened here.
The resolve task has found the commons-lang and commons-cli modules in the maven 2 repository, identified that commons-cli depends on commons-logging and so resolved it as a transitive dependency. Then Ivy has downloaded all corresponding artifacts in its cache (by default in your user home, in a .ivy2/cache directory). Finally, the retrieve task copies the resolved jars from the ivy cache to the default library directory of the project: the lib dir (you can change this easily by setting the pattern attribute on the retrieve task).

You might say that the task took a long time just to write out a "Hello Ivy !" message. But remember that a lot of time was spent downloading the required files from the web. Let's try to run it again: Great! the cache was used, no download was needed and the build was instantaneous.

And now, if you want to generate a report detailing all the dependencies of your module, you can call the report target, and check the generated file in the build directory. You should obtain something looking like this.

As you can see, using Ivy to resolve dependencies stored in the maven 2 repository is extremely easy. Now you can go on with the next tutorials to learn more about how to use module configurations which is a very powerful Ivy specific feature. Other tutorials are also available where you will learn how to use Ivy settings to leverage a possibly complex enterprise repository. It may also be a good time to start reading the reference documentation, and especially the introduction material which gives a good overview of Ivy. The best practices page is also a must read to start thinking about how to use Ant+Ivy to build a clean and robust build system.

---

Ivy comes bundled with some default settings which makes it pretty simple to use in common environment. This tutorial, which is close to a reference documentation, explains what are those default settings and how they can be adjusted to your needs.

To fully understand the concept of settings and what you can do with them, we suggest reading other tutorial related to settings (like Multiple Resolvers and Dual Resolver) or the Settings Files reference documentation.

Concept

This default settings mainly consist of 3 kind of repositories:

• local
a repository which is private to the user.
• shared
a repository which is shared between all the member of a team
• public
a public repository on which most modules, and especially third party modules, can be found

Note that if you work alone, the distinction between local and shared repository is not very important, but there are some things to know to distinguish them.

Now let's describe each of these repositories concept in more details. We will describe how they are setup physically later.

Local

The local repository is particularly useful when you want to do something without being disturbed by anything else happening in the environment. This means that whenever ivy is able to locate a module in this repository it will be used, no matter of what is available in others.

For instance, if you have a module declaring a dependency on the module foo in revision latest.integration, then if a revision of foo is found in the local repository, it will be used, even if a more recent revision is available in other repositories.

This may be disturbing for some of you, but imagine you have to implement a new feature on a project, and in order to achieve that you need to modify two modules: you add a new method in module foo and exploit this new method in module bar. Then if you publish the module foo to your local repository, you will be sure to get it in your bar module, even if someone else publish a new revision of foo in the shared repository (this revision not having the new method you are currently adding).

But be careful, when you have finished your development and publish it on the shared you will have to clean your local repository to benefit from new versions published in the shared repository.

Note also that modules found in the local repository must be complete, i.e. they must provide both a module descriptor and the published artifacts.

Shared

As its name suggest, the shared repository is aimed to be shared among a whole development team. It is a place where you can publish your team private modules for instance, and it's also a place where you can put modules not available in the public repository (sun jars, for instance), or simply not accurate (bad or incomplete module descriptors for instance).

Note that modules can be split across the shared repository and the public one: you can have the module descriptor in the shared repository and the artifacts in the public one, for instance.

Public

The public repository is the place where most modules can be found, but which sometimes lack the information you need. It's usually a repository available through an internet connection only, even if this is not mandatory.

Setting up the repositories

Now that we have seen the objective of each of the three repositories, let's see how they are setup and how to configure them to fit your needs.

First, several repositories uses the same root in your filesystem. Referenced as ${ivy.default.ivy.user.dir}, this is by default the directory .ivy2 in your user home.

Note that several things can be done by setting ivy variable. To set them without defining your own ivysettings.xml file, you can:

• set an ant property before any call to ivy in your build file if you use ivy from ant
• set an environment variable if you use ivy from the command line

For instance:

<target name="resolve">
  <property name="ivy.default.ivy.user.dir" value="/path/to/ivy/user/dir"/>
  <ivy:resolve />
</target>

Now we will show how to override default values for the different kind of repositories, note that you can find what are these default values below in the detail of the default settings.

Local

By default, the local repository lies in ${ivy.default.ivy.user.dir}/local. This is usually a good place, but you may want to modify it however. No problem, you just have to set the following ivy variable to the directory you want to use:

ivy.local.default.root

. For instance:

ivy.local.default.root=/opt/ivy/repository/local

.

If you already have something you would like to use as your local repository, you may also want to modify the layout of this repository. Once again, two variables are available for that:

ivy.local.default.ivy.pattern

gives the pattern to find ivy files

ivy.local.default.artifact.pattern

gives the pattern to find artifacts
For example:

ivy.local.default.root=/opt/ivy/repository/local
ivy.local.default.ivy.pattern=[module]/[revision]/ivy.xml
ivy.local.default.artifact.pattern=[module]/[revision]/[artifact].[ext]

Shared

By default, the shared repository lies in ${ivy.default.ivy.user.dir}/shared. This is fine if you work alone, but the shared repository is supposed to be, mmm, shared! So changing this directory is often required, and it is usually modified to point to a network shared directory. You can use

ivy.shared.default.root

variable to specify in a new directory. Moreover, you can also configure the layout with variables similar to the one for the local repository:

ivy.shared.default.ivy.pattern

gives the pattern to find ivy files

ivy.shared.default.artifact.pattern

gives the pattern to find artifacts
For example:

ivy.shared.default.root=/opt/ivy/repository/shared
ivy.shared.default.ivy.pattern=[organisation]/[module]/[revision]/ivy.xml
ivy.shared.default.artifact.pattern=[organisation]/[module]/[revision]/[artifact].[ext]

Public

By default, the public repository is ibiblio in m2 compatible mode (in other words, the maven 2 public repository).

This repository has the advantage of providing a lot of modules, with metadata for most of them. The quality of metadata is not always perfect, but it's a very good start to use a tool like Ivy and benefit from the power of transitive dependency management.

Despite its ease of use, we suggest reading the Best practices to have a good understanding of the pros and cons of using a public unmanaged repository before depending on such a repository for your enterprise build system.

In 1.4 version Ivy was using ivyrep has default resolver, if you want to restore this, set
ivy.14.compatible=true as an ant property

Going further

OK, so we have seen how to easily change the settings of the three main repositories. But what if my shared repository is on a web server? What if you don't want to use maven 2 repository as public repository? What if ...

No problem, Ivy is very flexible and be configured with very specific settings to match your needs and environment. But before considering writing your own settings from scratch, we suggest reading the following where you will learn how to leverage a part of the default settings and adjust the rest.

But before explaining how, you will need to have a quick overview of how ivy is configured by default.

By default, ivy is configured using an ivysettings.xml which is packaged in the ivy jar. Here is this settings file:

<ivysettings>
  <settings defaultResolver="default"/>
  <include url="${ivy.default.settings.dir}/ivysettings-public.xml"/>
  <include url="${ivy.default.settings.dir}/ivysettings-shared.xml"/>
  <include url="${ivy.default.settings.dir}/ivysettings-local.xml"/>
  <include url="${ivy.default.settings.dir}/ivysettings-main-chain.xml"/>
  <include url="${ivy.default.settings.dir}/ivysettings-default-chain.xml"/>
</ivysettings>

OK, so not much info here, except a lot of inclusions. These inclusions have been done on purpose so that you can easily change only one part of the ivysettings and benefit of the rest easily. For example, if you want to define your own public resolver, you will just have to configure ivy with an ivysettings like that:

<ivysettings>
  <settings defaultResolver="default"/>
  <include url="http://myserver/ivy/myivysettings-public.xml"/>
  <include url="${ivy.default.settings.dir}/ivysettings-shared.xml"/>
  <include url="${ivy.default.settings.dir}/ivysettings-local.xml"/>
  <include url="${ivy.default.settings.dir}/ivysettings-main-chain.xml"/>
  <include url="${ivy.default.settings.dir}/ivysettings-default-chain.xml"/>
</ivysettings>

Note that only the ivysettings-public inclusion has changed to include a home made public resolver. Note also that this can be used like that thanks to the fact that ${ivy.default.settings.dir} is a variable which is always set to the place where ivy default settings files are (i.e. packaged in the jar).
To finish this example, you have to write your own ivysettings file (that you will make available at http://myserver/ivy/myivysettings-public.xml in this example) for defining your own public resolver. For instance:

<ivysettings>
  <resolvers>
    <filesystem name="public">
      <ivy pattern="/path/to/my/public/rep/[organisation]/[module]/ivy-[revision].xml" />
      <artifact pattern="/path/to/my/public/rep/[organisation]/[module]/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]" />
    </filesystem>
  </resolvers>
</ivysettings>

Now the last thing you will need in order to properly take advantage of the default settings is the content of each included ivysettings file:
ivysettings-public.xml

<ivysettings>
  <resolvers>
    <ibiblio name="public" m2compatible="true"/>
  </resolvers>
</ivysettings>

ivysettings-shared.xml

<ivysettings>
  <property name="ivy.shared.default.root"             value="${ivy.default.ivy.user.dir}/shared" override="false"/>
  <property name="ivy.shared.default.ivy.pattern"      value="[organisation]/[module]/[revision]/[type]s/[artifact].[ext]" override="false"/>
  <property name="ivy.shared.default.artifact.pattern" value="[organisation]/[module]/[revision]/[type]s/[artifact].[ext]" override="false"/>
  <resolvers>
    <filesystem name="shared">
      <ivy pattern="${ivy.shared.default.root}/${ivy.shared.default.ivy.pattern}" />
      <artifact pattern="${ivy.shared.default.root}/${ivy.shared.default.artifact.pattern}" />
    </filesystem>
  </resolvers>
</ivysettings>

ivysettings-local.xml

<ivysettings>
  <property name="ivy.local.default.root"             value="${ivy.default.ivy.user.dir}/local" override="false"/>
  <property name="ivy.local.default.ivy.pattern"      value="[organisation]/[module]/[revision]/[type]s/[artifact].[ext]" override="false"/>
  <property name="ivy.local.default.artifact.pattern" value="[organisation]/[module]/[revision]/[type]s/[artifact].[ext]" override="false"/>
  <resolvers>
    <filesystem name="local">
      <ivy pattern="${ivy.local.default.root}/${ivy.local.default.ivy.pattern}" />
      <artifact pattern="${ivy.local.default.root}/${ivy.local.default.artifact.pattern}" />
    </filesystem>
  </resolvers>
</ivysettings>

ivysettings-main-chain.xml

<ivysettings>
  <resolvers>
    <chain name="main" dual="true">
      <resolver ref="shared"/>
      <resolver ref="public"/>
    </chain>
  </resolvers>
</ivysettings>

ivysettings-default-chain.xml

<ivysettings>
  <resolvers>
    <chain name="default" returnFirst="true">
      <resolver ref="local"/>
      <resolver ref="main"/>
    </chain>
  </resolvers>
</ivysettings>

Here you are, you have enough clues to configure that the way you want... check the settings documentation to see if what you want to do is possible, and go ahead!

---

This example is an illustration of how modules can be retrieved by multiple resolvers. Using multiple resolvers can be useful in many contexts, here are some examples:

• separate integration builds from releases
• use a public repository for third party modules and a private one for internal modules
• use a repository for storing modules which are not accurate in an unmanaged public repository
• use a local repository to expose builds made on one developer's station

In Ivy, the use of multiple resolvers is supported by one compound resolver called a chain resolver.

In our example, we will simply show how to use two resolvers, one on a local repository and one using maven2 repository.

project description

the project: chained-resolvers

The project is very simple and contains only one simple class: example.Hello.

It depends on two libraries: Apache commons-lang and a little test library (sources are included in jar file). The test library is used by the project to uppercase a string, and commons-lang is used to capitalize the same string.

Here is the content of the project:

• build.xml: the ant build file for the project
• ivy.xml: the ivy project file
• src\example\Hello.java: the only class of the project

Let's have a look at the ivy.xml file:

<ivy-module version="1.0">
    <info organisation="org.apache" module="chained-resolvers"/>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency org="commons-lang" name="commons-lang" rev="2.0"/>
        <dependency name="test" rev="1.0"/>
    </dependencies>
</ivy-module>

As we expect, the ivy file declares to be dependent on the two libraries that the project use: commons-lang and test. Note that we don't specify the organisation for the dependency test, in this case Ivy assumes the same org as the declaring module, ie org.apache in this case.

the ivy settings

The ivy settings is made in the settings directory it contains only one file: ivysettings.xml.

<ivysettings>
  <settings defaultResolver="chain-example"/>
  <resolvers>
    <chain name="chain-example">
      <filesystem name="libraries">
        <artifact pattern="${ivy.settings.dir}/repository/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]" />
      </filesystem>
      <ibiblio name="ibiblio" m2compatible="true" />
    </chain>
  </resolvers>
</ivysettings>

the settings tag

This tag initializes ivy with some parameters. Here only one is used, the name of the resolver to use by default.

the resolvers tag

Under this tag, we can find the description of the resolvers that ivy will use. In our example, we have only one resolver, called "chain-example", which is quite special as it defines a list (a chain) of resolvers.
The resolvers put in the chain are :

• libraries : it is a file resolver. This one is configured to look for artifacts in the "repository" sub directory of the directory that contains the ivysettings.xml file.
• ibiblio : this resolver is a special one. It looks in the ibiblio maven repository to retrieve the libraries.

That's it, we have configured a chain of resolvers!

walkthrough

We can see in the log of the resolve task, that the two dependencies have been retrieved (2 artifacts) and copied to the ivy cache directory (2 downloaded).

The run target succeed in using both commons-lang.jar comming from ibiblio repository and test.jar coming from the local repository.

Going further

This very simple example helps to see how to make a basic setting of two resolvers in a chain. The chain resolver's reference documentation is available for those who would like to know all the features offered by this resolver.

The most interesting things to know that you can try out from this basic example are:

• a chain is not limited to two nested resolvers, you can use the number you want
• by setting returnFirst="true", you can have a chain which stops as soon as it has found a result for a given module
• by setting dual="true", the full chain will be used both for module descriptors and artifacts, while with dual="false", the resolver in the chain which found the module descriptor (if any) is also used for artifacts

---

In some cases it may happen that your module descriptors (Ivy files, maven pom, ...) are located at one place and module artifacts (jars, ...) at another place.

Dual Resolver is used to address this kind of need, and this tutorial will show how to use it.

project description

Let's have a look at the src/example/dual directory in your ivy distribution.
It contains a build file and 3 directories:

• settings: contains the ivy settings file
• repository: a sample repository of ivy files
• project: the project making use of ivy with dual resolver

the dual project

The project is very simple and contains only one simple class: example.Hello
It depends on two libraries: Apache commons-lang and Apache commons-httpclient.

Here is the content of the project:

• build.xml: the ant build file for the project
• ivy.xml: the ivy project file
• src\example\Hello.java: the only class of the project

Let's have a look at the ivy.xml file:

<ivy-module version="1.0">
    <info organisation="org.apache" module="hello-ivy"/>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency org="commons-httpclient" name="commons-httpclient" rev="2.0.2"/>
        <dependency org="commons-lang" name="commons-lang" rev="2.0"/>
    </dependencies>
</ivy-module>

As you can see, nothing special here... Indeed, it's the philosophy of ivy to keep ivy files independent of the way dependencies are resolved.

the ivy settings

The ivy settings is made in the settings directory; it contains only one file: ivysettings.xml.

<ivysettings>
  <settings defaultResolver="dual-example"/>
  <resolvers>
    <dual name="dual-example">
      <filesystem name="ivys">
        <ivy pattern="${ivy.settings.dir}/../repository/[module]-ivy-[revision].xml" />
      </filesystem>
      <ibiblio name="ibiblio" m2compatible="true" usepoms="false" />
    </dual>
  </resolvers>
</ivysettings>

Here we configure one resolver, the default one, which is a dual resolver. This dual resolver has two sub resolvers: the first is what is called the "ivy" or "metadata" resolver of the dual resolver, and the second one is what is called the "artifact" resolver. It is important that the dual resolver exactly has two sub resolvers in this given order.
The metadata resolver, here a filesystem one, is used only to find module descriptors, in this case Ivy files. The settings given in this resolver says that all ivy files are in the same directory, named like that: [module]-ivy-[revision].xml. If we check the repository directory, we can confirm that it contains a file named commons-httpclient-ivy-2.0.2.xml. It fulfills the given pattern and will thus be found by this resolver.
The artifact resolver is simply an ibiblio one, configured in m2compatible mode to use the maven 2 repository, with usepoms="false" to make sure it won't use maven 2 metadata. Note that this isn't strictly necessary, since the second resolver in a dual resolver (the artifact resolver) is never asked to find module metadata.

walkthrough

As you can see, ivy not only downloaded commons-lang and commons-httpclient, but also commons-logging. Indeed, commons-logging is a dependency of httpclient, as we can see in the httpclient ivy file found in the repository directory:

<ivy-module version="1.0">
    <info 
        organisation="commons-httpclient"
        module="commons-httpclient"
        revision="2.0.2"
        status="release"
        publication="20041010174300"/>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency org="commons-logging" name="commons-logging" rev="1.0.4" conf="default"/>
    </dependencies>
</ivy-module>

So everything worked well, ivy file has been found in the repository directory and artifacts have been downloaded from ibiblio.

This kind of setup can be useful if you don't want to rely on maven 2 repository for metadata, or if you want to take full advantage of Ivy files for some or all modules. Combining chain and dual resolvers can lead to very flexible settings addressing most needs.

For full details about the dual resolver, have a look at the corresponding reference documentation.

---

This example is an illustration of dependency between two projects.

The depender project declares that it uses the dependee one. We will illustrate two things:

• public libraries declared by standalone project will automatically be retrieved by the dependant project
• the depender project will retrieve the "latest" version of the dependee project

projects used

dependee

The dependee project is very simple. It depends on the apache library commons-lang and contains only one class: standalone.Main which provides two services:

• return the version of the project
• capitalize a string using org.apache.commons.lang.WordUtils.capitalizeFully

Here is the content of the project:

• build.xml: the ant build file for the project
• ivy.xml: the project ivy file
• src\standalone\Main.java: the only class of the project

Take a look at the ivy.xml file:

<ivy-module version="1.0">
    <info organisation="org.apache" module="dependee"/>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency org="commons-lang" name="commons-lang" rev="2.0"/>
    </dependencies>
</ivy-module>

The ivy dependency file declares only one dependency on apache commons-lang library.

depender

The project depender is very simple too. It declares only one dependency on the latest version of the dependee project and it contains only one class depending.Main which make 2 things:

• getting the version of the standalone project throw a call to standalone.Main.getVersion()
• transform a string throw a call to standalone.Main.capitalizeWords(str)

Take a look at the ivy.xml file:

<ivy-module version="1.0">
    <info organisation="org.apache" module="depender"/>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency name="dependee" rev="latest.integration" />
    </dependencies>
</ivy-module>

settings

The ivy settings is made in the settings directory which contains 2 files:

• ivysettings.properties: a property file
• ivysettings.xml: the file containing the settings

Let's have a look at the ivysettings.xml file:

<ivysettings>
	<properties file="${ivy.settings.dir}/ivysettings.properties"/>
	<settings defaultCache="${ivy.settings.dir}/ivy-cache" defaultResolver="libraries"/>
	<resolvers>
		<filesystem name="projects">
			<artifact pattern="${repository.dir}/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]" />
			<ivy pattern="${repository.dir}/[module]-[revision].xml" />
		</filesystem>
		<ibiblio name="libraries" m2compatible="true" usepoms="false" />
	</resolvers>
	<modules>
		<module organisation="org.apache" name="dependee" resolver="projects"/>
	</modules>
</ivysettings>

The file contains four main tags: properties, settings, resolvers and modules.

properties

This tag only load some properties for the ivy process in the same manner as ant would do it.

settings

This tag is in charge of initializing some parameters for ivy process. The directory that ivy will use to cache artifacts will be in a sub directory called ivy-cache of the directory containing the ivysettings.xml file itself.
The second parameter, tells ivy to use a resolver called "libraries" as its default resolver. More information can be found in the settings reference documentation.

resolvers

This tag defines the resolvers to use. Here we have two resolvers defined: "projects" and "libraries".
The filesystem resolver called "projects" is able to resolve the internal dependencies by locating them on the local filesystem.
The ibiblio resolver called "libraries" is able to find dependencies on maven 2 repository, but doesn't use maven poms.

modules

The modules tag allows to configure which resolver should be used for which module. Here the settings only tells to use the "projects" resolver for all modules having for organisation "org.apache" and for module name "dependee". This actually corresponds to only one module, but a regular expression could be used, or many other kind of expressions (like glob expressions).

For other modules (i.e. all modules but org.apache#dependee), since there is no special settings, the default resolver will be used: "libraries".

walkthrough

To give more details on the publish, as you can see the call to the publish task has resulted in two main things:

• the delivery of a resolved ivy file to build/ivy.xml.
This has been done because by default the publish task not only publishes artifacts but also ivy file. So it has looked to the path where the ivy file to publish should be, using the artifactspattern: ${build.dir}/[artifact].[ext].
For an ivy file, this resolves to build/ivy.xml. Because this file does not exist, it automatically makes a call to the deliver task which delivers a resolved ivy file to this destination.
• the publication of artifact dependee and resolved ivy file to the repository.
Both are mere copy of files found in the current project, more precisely in the build dir. This is because the artifactspattern has been set to ${build.dir}/[artifact].[ext], so dependee artifact is found in build/dependee.jar and ivy file in build/ivy.xml. And because we have asked the publish task to publish them using the "projects" resolver, these files are copied to repository\dependee-1.jar and to repository\dependee-1.xml, respecting the artifact and ivy patterns of our settings (see above).

Ok now our repository contains two versions of the project dependee, other projects can refer to both versions.

---

In the previous tutorial you have seen how to deal with dependencies between two simple projects.

This tutorial will guide you through the use of ivy in a more complete environment. All the sources of this tutorial are available in src/example/multi-project in ivy distribution.

Context

Here is a 10000ft overview of the projects involved in this tutorial:

• version
helps to identify module by a version
• list
gives a list of files in a directory (recursively)
• size
gives the total size of all files in a directory, or of a collection of files
• find
find files in a given dir or among a list of files which match a given name
• sizewhere
gives the total size of files matching a name in a directory
• console
give access to all other modules features through a simple console app

For sure this is not aimed to demonstrate how to develop a complex app or give indication of advanced algorithm :-)

But this gives a simple understanding of how Ant+Ivy can be used to develop an application divided in multiple modules.

Now, here is how these modules relate to each other:

click to enlarge Modules in yellow are the modules described in this tutorial, and modules in blue are external dependencies (we will see how to generate this graph later in this tutorial).

As you can see, we have here a pretty interesting set of modules with dependencies between each other, each depending on the latest version of the others.

The example files

The sources for this tutorial can be found in src/example/multi-project in the ivy distribution. In this directory, you will find the following files:

• build.xml
This is a root build file which can be used to call targets on all modules, in the order of their dependencies (ensuring that a module is always built before any module depending on it, for instance)
• common
  • common.xml
  the common build file imported by all build.xml files for each project. This build defines the targets which can be used in all projects.
  • build.properties
  some properties common to all projects
• projects
contains a directory per module, with for each
• ivy.xml
Ivy file of the module, describing its dependencies upon other modules and / or external modules.
Example:

<ivy-module version="1.0">
    <info 
        organisation="org.apache.ivy.example"
        module="find"
        status="integration"/>
    <configurations>
      <conf name="core"/>
      <conf name="standalone" extends="core"/>
    </configurations>
    <publications>
      <artifact name="find" type="jar" conf="core" />
    </publications>
    <dependencies>
      <dependency name="version" rev="latest.integration" conf="core->default" />
      <dependency name="list" rev="latest.integration" conf="core" />
      <dependency org="commons-collections" name="commons-collections" rev="3.1" conf="core->default" />
      <dependency org="commons-cli" name="commons-cli" rev="1.0" conf="standalone->default" />
    </dependencies>
</ivy-module>

• build.xml
The build file of the project, which consists mainly in an import of the common build file and of a module specific properties file:

<project name="find" default="compile">
	<property file="build.properties"/>
	
	<import file="${common.dir}/common.xml"/>
</project>

• build.properties
Module specific properties + properties to find the common build file

projects.dir = ${basedir}/..
wkspace.dir = ${projects.dir}/..
common.dir = ${wkspace.dir}/common

• src
the source directory with all java sources

Note that this doesn't demonstrate good practice for software development in general, in particular you won't find any unit test in these samples, even if we think unit testing is very important. But this isn't the aim of this tutorial.

Now that you are a bit more familiar with the structure, let's have a look at the most important part of this example: the common build file. Indeed, as you have seen all modules build files only import the common build file, and defines their dependencies in their ivy files (which you should begin to be familiar with).

So, here are some aspects of this common build file:

ivy settings

<!-- setup ivy default configuration with some custom info -->
<property name="ivy.local.default.root" value="${repository.dir}/local"/>
<property name="ivy.shared.default.root" value="${repository.dir}/shared"/>

<!-- here is how we would have configured ivy if we had our own ivysettings file
<ivy:settings file="${common.dir}/ivysettings.xml" id="ivy.instance" />
-->

This declaration configures ivy only by setting two properties: the location for the local repository and the location for the shared repository. It's the only settings done here, since ivy is configured by default to work in a team environment (see default settings tutorial for details about this). For sure in a real environment the shared repository location would rather be in a team shared directory (or in a more complex repository, again see the default settings tutorial to see how to use something really different).
Commented out you can see how the settings would have been done if the default settings wasn't ok for our purpose.

resolve dependencies

<target name="resolve" depends="clean-lib, load-ivy" description="--> resolve and retrieve dependencies with ivy">
    <mkdir dir="${lib.dir}"/> <!-- not usually necessary, ivy creates the directory IF there are dependencies -->
    
    <!-- the call to resolve is not mandatory, retrieve makes an implicit call if we don't -->
    <ivy:resolve file="${ivy.file}"/>
    <ivy:retrieve pattern="${lib.dir}/[artifact].[ext]" />
</target>

You should begin to be familiar with this kind of use of Ivy. We call resolve explicitly to use the ivy file configured (the default would have been fine), and then call retrieve to copy resolved dependencies artifacts from the cache to a local lib directory. The pattern is also used to name the artifacts in the lib dir with their name and extension only (without revision), this is easier to use with an IDE, the IDE configuration won't change when the artifacts version change.

ivy-new-version

<target name="ivy-new-version" depends="load-ivy" unless="ivy.new.revision">
    <!-- default module version prefix value -->
    <property name="module.version.prefix" value="${module.version.target}-dev-b" />
    
    <!-- asks to ivy an available version number -->
    <ivy:info file="${ivy.file}" />
    <ivy:buildnumber 
        organisation="${ivy.organisation}" module="${ivy.module}" 
        revision="${module.version.prefix}" defaultBuildNumber="1" revSep=""/>
</target>

This target is used to ask Ivy to find a new version for a module. To get detailed about the module we are dealing with, we use directly the information found in the ivy file using the ivy:info task. Then the buildnumber task is used to get a new revision, based on a prefix we set with a property, by default it will be 1.0-dev-b (have a look at the default value for module.version.target in the common build properties file). Each module build by this common build file could easily override this by either setting a different module.version.target in its module specific build.properties, or even overriding module.version.prefix. To get the new revision Ivy scans the repository to find the latest available version with the given prefix, and increment this version by 1.

publish

<target name="publish" depends="clean-build, jar" description="--> publish this project in the ivy repository">
    <ivy:publish artifactspattern="${build.dir}/[artifact].[ext]" 
                       resolver="shared"
                       pubrevision="${version}" 
                       status="release"
    />
    <echo message="project ${ant.project.name} released with version ${version}" />
</target>

This target publishes the module in the shared repository, with the revision found in the version property, which is set by other targets (based on ivy-new-version we have seen above). It can be used when a module reaches a specific milestone, or whenever you want the team to benefit from a new version of the module.

publish-local

<target name="publish-local" depends="local-version, jar" description="--> publish this project in the local ivy repository">
    <ivy:publish artifactspattern="${build.dir}/[artifact].[ext]" 
                    resolver="local"
                    pubrevision="${version}"
                    pubdate="${now}"
                    status="integration"
                    forcedeliver="true"
    />
    <echo message="project ${ant.project.name} published locally with version ${version}" />
</target>

This is very similar to the publish task, except that this publish the revision in the local repository, which is used only in your environment and doesn't disturb the team. When you change something in a module and want to benefit from the change in another one, you can simply call publish-local in this module, and then your next build of the other module will automatically get this local version.

clean-local

<target name="clean-local" description="--> cleans the local repository for the current module">
   <delete dir="${ivy.local.default.root}/${ant.project.name}"/>
</target>

This target is used when you don't want to use your local version of a module anymore, for example when you release a new version to the whole team, or discard your local changes and want to take advantage of a new version from the team.

report

<target name="report" depends="resolve" description="--> generates a report of dependencies">
    <ivy:report todir="${build.dir}"/>
</target>

Generates both an html report and a graphml report.

For example, to generate a graph like the one shown at the beginning of this tutorial, you just have to follow the instructions given here with the graphml file you will find in

projects/console/build/

after having called report in the console project, and that's it, you have a clear overview of all your app dependencies !

Playing with the projects

To play with this tutorial you can use regular ant commands. Begin in the base directory of the tutorial (src/example/multi-project), and run ant -p: This gives you an idea of what you can do here. To make sure you have at least one version of all your modules published in your repository (required to build modules having dependencies on the others), you can run ant publish-all (example log here).

You will see that Ivy calls the publish target on all the modules, following the order of the dependencies, so that a dependee is always built and published before its depender. Feel free to make changes in the source code of a module (changing a method name for instance) and in the module using the method, then call publish-all to see how the change in the dependee is compiled first, published, and then available to the depender which can compile successfully.

Then you can go in one of the example project directory (like projects/find for instance), and run ant -p: You can see the targets available, thanks to the import of the common.xml build file. Pay with the project by calling resolve, publish, and see what happens when you do the same in other projects. An interesting thing to do for instance is to change the dependencies of a project: if the module version now depends on a new commons library, you will see that all other projects depending on version will get this library as part of their transitive dependencies once the new revision of the version project is published. Very easy! And if a project introduces a change with which the depender is incompatible yet, you can very easily change the dependency in the depender to move from latest.integration to a fixed version with which the depender is compatible (probably the latest before the change). Keeping your modules under control is now very easy!

You should then be pretty familiar with multi project development with Ivy, we hope you will appreciate its power and flexibility! And those tutorials are only the beginning of your journey with Ivy, browse the reference documentation to learn more about the features, subscribe to the mailing lists to share your experience and ask questions with the community, browse the source code, open jira issues, submit patches, join in and help make Ivy the best dependency management tool!

---

This tutorial introduces the use of module configurations in ivy files. Ivy module configurations is indeed a very important concept. Someone even told me one day that using Ivy without using configurations is like eating a good cheese without touching the glass of Chateau Margaux 1976 you have just aside :-)

More seriously, configurations in ivy can be better understood as views on your module, and you will see how they can be used efficiently here.

Reference documentation on configurations can be found here and here.

Introduction

Source code available in src/example/configurations/multi-projects.
We have two projects :
- filter-framework is a library that defines an api to filter String arrays and two implementations of this api.
- myapp is a very small app that uses filter-framework.

The library produces 3 artifacts:
- the api jar,
- an implementation jar with no external dependency,
- an other implementation that needs commons-collections to perform.

The application only need api to compile and can use any of the two implementation at runtime.

The library project

The first project we defined in this tutorial is the filter-framework.
In order to have a fine grained artifacts publication definition, we defined configurations to map usage other can make of our library.

The ivy.xml file

Explanation

As you can see we defined 3 public configurations and a private one (defined junit dependency for testing).
The 2 implementations conf homemade-impl, cc-impl extends api configuration so artifacts defined in api will also be required in its extending conf.
In the publications tag we defined the artifacts we produce (here it's jars) and we affect them a configuration.
Later when others will use our library they will have a very flexible way to define what they need.

See it in action

The library project is build using ant. Open a shell in the root directory of the project and type ant. The ant's default target is publish.
This target uses ivy to publish our library binaries in a local repository.
As we do not specify any repository path the default one is used. ({home.dir}/.ivy2/local/org.apache/filter-framework/)
Now we are ready to use our library.

The application project

Now that we have shipped our fantastic library, we want to use it!
The tutorial comes with a sample application called myapp.

The ivy.xml file

Explanation

We create 3 configurations that define the way we want to use the application.
The build configuration defines the compile-time dependencies, and thus only needs the api conf from filter-framework.
The other configurations define runtime dependencies. One will only use "home-made" jars, and the other will use external jars.

We also defined a dependency on the previous library.
In the dependency we use configuration mapping to match ours and library configurations.
You can found more information on configuration mapping here

1. build->api : here we tell ivy that our build configuration depends on the api configuration of the dependcy
2. noexternaljar->homemade-impl : here we tell ivy that our noexternaljar configuration depends on the homemade-impl configuration of the dependcy.
3. withexternaljar->cc-impl : here we tell ivy that our withexternaljar configuration depends on the cc-impl configuration of the dependcy

Note that we never declare any of the dependency artifacts we need in each configuration: it's the dependency module file which declares the published artifacts and which should be used in each configuration.

In the ant buld.xml file we defined a resolve target as follow:

<target name="resolve" description="--> retreive dependencies with ivy">
    <ivy:retrieve pattern="${ivy.lib.dir}/[conf]/[artifact].[ext]"/>
</target>    

When we call this target, Ivy will do a resolve using our ivy.xml file in the root folder and then retrieve all the artifacts. The artifacts retrieved are kept in separate folders according to the configurations they belong to. Here is how your lib directory should look like after a call to this target: As you can see for each configuration we have now a set of jars.

Let's try to launch our app.

See it in action

Use ant to run the application.
Default ant target is run-cc and will launch application using the Apache commons-collections implementation. Launching application with only home made jars is straightforward.
type ant run-hm
Nice we got the same result but we can see that implementation classes are different.

Conclusion

You should use configurations as often as possible
Configurations are very important concept in ivy. They allow you to group artifacts by meaning.
When you write ivy file for projects that are supposed to be reused, use configurations to allow people to get only they what they need without having to specify it by hand using artifact tag in dependency section.

---

The install task let you copy a module or a set of modules from one repository to another one. This is very useful to build and maintain a enterprise or a team repository. If you don't want to give access to the public maven 2 repository to the developers in your team (to keep control over which modules are in use in your company or your team for instance), it can sometimes become tiresome to answer the developers request to add new modules or new versions by hand.

Fortunately the install task is here to help: you can use specific settings for your repository maintenance build which will be used to maintain your target enterprise repository. These settings will point to another repository (for instance the maven 2 public repository) so that you will just have to ask Ivy to install the modules you want with a simple command line.

To demonstrate this we will first use some basic ivy settings files to show how it works, and then we will use the advanced namespaces feature to demonstrate how to deal with naming mismatch between the source and target repository.

The project used

The project that we will use is pretty simple.
It is composed of an ant build file, and some ivy settings files.

Here are the accessible target that we will use :

The project is accessible in the src/example/build-a-ivy-repository

Next steps:
Basic repository copy
Using namespaces

---

In this first step we use the install task to install modules from the maven 2 repository to a file system based repository. We first install a module with no dependency, then a module with its dependencies.

Basic: ivysettings.xml file used

The ivy settings file that we will use is very simple here. It defines two resolvers, libraries and my-repository. The first one is used as the source, the second one as the destination. In a typical setup the second one would be configured using included settings, used by the development team.

<ivysettings>
	<settings	defaultCache="${ivy.cache.dir}/no-namespace"	
			defaultResolver="libraries"
			defaultConflictManager="all" />		<!-- in order to get all revisions without any eviction -->
	<resolvers>
		<ibiblio name="libraries" m2compatible="true" />
  		<filesystem name="my-repository">
  			<ivy pattern="${dest.repo.dir}/no-namespace/[organisation]/[module]/ivys/ivy-[revision].xml"/>
  			<artifact pattern="${dest.repo.dir}/no-namespace/[organisation]/[module]/[type]s/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]"/>
  		</filesystem>
	</resolvers>
</ivysettings>

install a simple module with no dependencies

Let's have a look at the maven2 target.

    <target name="maven2" depends="init-ivy"
    	description="--> install module from maven 2 repository">
    	<ivy:install settingsRef="basic.settings" 
    		organisation="commons-lang" module="commons-lang" revision="1.0" 
    		from="${from.resolver}" to="${to.resolver}" />
    </target>

Pretty simple, we call the [[ant:install] task with the settings we have loaded using ivy:settings as usual, we provide fromResolver (source) and toResolver (destination) using properties to ease the maintenance of the script, but it's basically the name of our resolvers: 'libraries' for the source and 'my-repository' for the destination.

Here is the ant call output : The trace tells us that the module definition was found using the "libraries" resolver and that the corresponding artifact was downloaded from maven 2 repository. Then both were published to the filesystem repository (my-repository).

Let's have a look at our repository : We can see that we now have the commons-lang module version 1.0 in our repository, with a generated ivy.xml file, its jar, and all the md5 and sha1 checksums for future consistency checks when developers will use this repository to resolve modules.

install a module with dependencies

Now let's say that we want to be sure all the dependencies of the module we install are available in our repository after the installation. We could either install without dependencies on a staging repository and check the missing dependencies (more control), or use transitive dependency management and ask Ivy to install everything for us (much simpler).

The target called is very similar to the one described above, except that we explicitly ask for transitive installation.

    <target name="maven2-deps" depends="init-ivy" 
    	description="--> install module from maven 2 repository with dependencies">
    	<ivy:install settingsRef="basic.settings" 
    		organisation="org.hibernate" module="hibernate" revision="3.2.5.ga" 
    		from="${from.resolver}" to="${to.resolver}" transitive="true" />
    </target>

If you call this target, you will see that Ivy installs not only the hibernate module but also its dependencies: As you can see the installation has failed, if you look at the log you will see that there are missing artifacts on the source repository. This means that you will need to download those artifacts manually, and copy them to your destination repository to complete the installation. Fortunately Ivy use a best effort algorithm during install, so that you have everything installed but the missing artifacts.

You may also have notice that Ivy has installed 2 different revisions of commons-logging (1.0.2, 1.0.4). This is due to the fact that we use the "no conflict" conflict manager in the ivysettings file.

We do not want to evict any modules because we are building our own repository. Indeed if we get both commons-logging 1.0.2 and 1.0.4 it's because some modules among the transitive dependencies of hibernate depend on 1.0.2 and other on 1.0.4. If we got only 1.0.4, the module depending on 1.0.2 would be inconsistent in your own repository (depending on a version you don't have installed). Thus developers using this module directly would run into a problem.

If you now have a closer look at your repository, you will probably notice that it isn't an exact replication of the original one. Let's have a look at one module content: As you can see there is no pom here (pom is the module metadata format used by maven 2, available on the maven 2 repository). Instead you can see there's an ivy file, which is actually the original hibernate pom converted into an ivy file. So now you have a true Ivy repository with ivy files, where you can use the full power of Ivy if you want to adjust the module metadata (module configurations, fine grain exclusions and transitivity control, per module conflict manager, ...).

Ok, enough for this simple repository installation, the next tutorial will now show how you can deal with more complex cases where your source and destination repositories do not follow the same naming conventions.

---

Now that you have seen how simple it is to create your own repository from an existing one, you may wonder how you can handle more complex cases, when the source and destination repositories don't follow the same naming conventions for instance.

On the road to a professional repository

We will study in this section how to build a professionnal repository. What is a professionnal repository? Our vision is to say that a good quality repository must follow clear rules about projects naming and must offer corrects, usuables, configurables and verified project descriptors. In order to achieve those goals, we think that you have to build your own repository.
We have seen in the previous example, that we could use some public repositories to begin to build our own repository.
Nevertheless, the result is not always the expected one, especially concerning the naming rules used.

This problem is pretty usual when you have an existing repository, and want to benefit from a large public repositories which do not follow the same naming conventions. Or simply because you find the public repository you use as a basis is not consistent enough - why all apache commons module aren't don't use the org.apache.commons organization? For historical reasons. But if you setup your own repository you may not want to suffer from history.

Fortunately Ivy has a very powerful answer to this kind of problem: namespaces.

Using namespaces

If you look at the repository built with the previous tutorial, you will see exactly what we were talking about: all apache commons module use their own name as organization.

So let's see what Ivy can do using namespaces (we will dig into details later): Now if we look at our repository, it seems to look fine. We can even have a look at the commons-lang ivy file in our repo: Allright, we see that the organization is now 'apache'. But where did Ivy picked this up?

How does this work ?

Actually Ivy uses the same repository as before as source repository, with only one difference: the namespace parameter:

<ibiblio	name="libraries" 
    root="${ibiblio-maven2-root}" 
    m2compatible="true"
    namespace="maven2"
/>

A namespace is defined by a set of rules. These rules are based on regular expressions and tell Ivy how to convert data from the repository namespace from and to what is called the system namespace, i.e. the namespace in which Ivy runs most of the time (Ivy cache is always using the system namespace for instance).

For the namespace we call maven2, we have declared some rules, here is one:

rule handling imported apache maven1 projects

<rule>	<!-- imported apache maven1 projects -->
	<fromsystem>
	    <src org="apache" module=".+"/>
	    
	    <dest org="$m0" module="$m0"/>
	</fromsystem>
	<tosystem>
	    <src org="commons-.+" module="commons-.+" />
	    <src org="ant.*" module="ant.*" />
	    ...
	    <src org="xmlrpc" module="xmlrpc" />

	    <dest org="apache" module="$m0"/>
	</tosystem>
</rule>

To understand namespaces,

• fromsystem : we define here that the projects defined in the system namespace under the organization called "apache" are transformed into the destination namespace into projects whose organization is named with the module name, whatever the revision is. For example, the project apache#commons-lang;1.0 in the system namespace will be translated into commons-lang#commons-lang;1.0 in the maven2 resolver namespace.
• tosystem : we define here the reverse mapping, ie how to translate apache projects from maven 2 repo into apache projects in the system namespace. The rule used here tells that all projects matching commons-.+ (see it as java regular expression) for their organization name and module name are transformed into projects whose organisation is apache with the module name as it was found. The same kind of rule is applied for others apache projects like ant, etc.

Ok, you should now get the idea behind namespace, you can now check the whole namespace settings provided in the example, and test the installation of a module and its dependencies using namespaces.

Run

ant maven2-namespace-deps

and you will see the resulting repository is cleaner than the first one we built.

From our experience investing in creating a namespace is worth the time it costs if you often need to add new modules or revisions of third party libraries in your own repository, where naming rules are already existing or rather strict.

---

If you have successfully followed and understood all the tutorials, maybe you still need to get a better picture of how to use Ivy in the real world.

Here are some links which can be interesting:

SAnt

SAnt is an experimental build system based on Ant and Ivy. It can be interesting to use as is or to get insight on an interesting approach to manage your builds.

Spring Modules

The spring modules project build system is based on Ant and Ivy, and it's really interesting to have a look at how a modularized project can take advantage of advanced ant and ivy features to make the build simpler.

Webwork

The webwork project (which should become struts action framework) uses ant+ivy for their build, and thus make their framework very easy to use in an ant+ivy build system. They have a page documenting how to use ivy with their framework, which can be an interesting reading even if you don't plan to use webwork.

Easing multi module development

Johan stuyts, the author of SAnt, also contributed a nice article on his view of how to use Ivy on a multi module environment.

---

Welcome to Ivy reference documentation!

If you don't know Ivy at all, give a glance at its features, the faq and the tutorials before digging into this reference documentation.

Reference Overview

This documentation is decomposed in several parts:

• Introduction
• Terminology
This part gives you the meaning of some words used all over ivy doc, such as organisation, module, configurations, settings, ...
• Main Concepts
This part introduces the main concepts used in Ivy: dependency resolvers, variables, patterns, and also a good introduction to a central ivy concept: module configurations.
• How does it work ?
As the title suggest, here you will have some explanations on how does ivy work internally, which can help to better understand and customize its use.
• Installation
This part describe how to install Ivy
• Settings Files
This part is dedicated to the specification of the settings file of Ivy (usually called ivysettings.xml). It also gives the list of built-in dependency resolvers available in ivy.
• Ivy Files
This part is the reference of the specification of the module descriptors, the ivy files in which you describe your dependencies. If you have any question of what can be done or not in an ivy file, you will have the answer here.
• Ant Tasks
This part describes how to use ivy from ant. It's in this section that all ant tasks brought by ivy are specified.
• Using standalone
Even though Ivy is most often used from ant, it can also be used from the command line. This page describes how you can do it.

---

---

Here are some terms used in Ivy, with their definitions in Ivy:

• Organisation
• Module
• Module Descriptor
• Artifact
• Type of an artifact
• Artifact file name extension
• Module Revision
• Branch
• Status of a revision
• Configurations of a module
• Ivy Settings
• Repository

Overview

The following illustration shows all the key terminology in one diagram:

Organisation

An organisation is either a company, an individual, or simply any group of people that produces software. In principle, Ivy handles only a single level of organisation meaning that they have a flat namespace in Ivy module descriptors. So, with Ivy descriptors, you can only describe a tree-like organisation structure, if you use a hierarchical naming convention. The organisation name is used for keeping together software produced by the same team, just to help locate their published works.

Often organisations will use their inverted domain name as their organisation name in Ivy, since domain names by definition are unique. A company whose domain name is www.example.com might want to use com.example, or if they had multiple teams all their organisation names could begin with com.example (e.g. com.example.rd, com.example.infra, com.example.services). The organisation name does neither really have to be an inverted domain name, nor even globally unique, but unique naming is highly recommended. Widely recognized trademark or trade name owners may choose to use their brand name instead.

Examples: org.apache, ibm, jayasoft

Note that the Ivy "organisation" is very similar to Maven POM "groupId".

Module

A module is a self-contained, reusable unit of software that, as a whole unit, follows a revision control scheme.

Ivy is only concerned about the module deliverables known as artifacts, and the module descriptor that declares them. These deliverables, for each revision of the module, are managed in repositories. In other words, to Ivy, a module is a chain of revisions each comprising a descriptor and one or more artifacts.

Examples: hibernate-entitymanager, ant

Module Descriptor

A module descriptor is a generic way of identifying what describes a module: the identifier (organisation, module name, branch and revision), the published artifacts, possible configurations and their dependencies.

The most common module descriptors in Ivy are Ivy Files, xml files with an Ivy specific syntax, and usually called ivy.xml.

But since Ivy is also compatible with maven 2 metadata format (called pom, for Project Object Model), pom files falls into the category of module descriptors.

And because Ivy accepts pluggable module descriptor parsers, you can use almost whatever you want as module descriptors.

Artifact

An artifact is a single file ready for delivery with the publication of a module revision, as a product of development.

Compressed package formats are often preferred because they are easier to manage, transfer and storage. For the same reasons, only one or a few artifacts per module are commonly used. However, artifacts can be of any file type and any number of them can be declared in a single module.

In the Java world, common artifacts are Java archives or JAR files. In many cases, each revision of a module publishes only one artifact (like jakarta-log4j-1.2.6.tar.gz, for instance), but some of them publish many artifacts dependending on the use of the module (like apache-ant binary and source distributions in zip, gz and bz2 package formats, for instance).

Examples: ant-1.7.0-bin.zip, apache-ant-1.7.0-src.tar.gz

Type of an artifact

The artifact type is a category of a particular kind of artifact specimen. It is a classification based on the intended purpose of an artifact or why is it provided, not a category of packaging format or how is the artifact delivered.

Although the type of an artifact may (rather accidentally) imply its file format, they are two different concepts. The artifact file name extension is more closely associated with its format. For example, in the case of Java archives the artifact type "jar" indicates that it is indeed a Java archive as per the JAR File specification. The file name extension happens to be "jar" as well. On the other hand, with source code distributions, the artifact type may be "source" while the file name extensions vary from "tar.gz", "zip", "java", "c", or "xml" to pretty much anything. So, the type of an artifact is basically an abstract functional category to explain its purpose, while the artifact file name extension is a more concrete technical indication of its format and, of course, naming.

Defining appropriate artifact types for a module is up to its development organisation. Common choices may include: "jar", "binary", "bin", "rc", "exe", "dll", "source", "src", "config", "conf", "cfg", "doc", "api", "spec", "manual", "man", "data", "var", "resource", "res", "sql", "schema", "deploy", "install", "setup", "distrib", "distro", "distr", "dist", "bundle", etc.

Module descriptors are not really artifacts, but they are comparable to an artifact type, i.e. "descriptor" (an ivy file or a Maven POM).

Electronic signatures or digests are not really artifacts themselves, but can be found with them in repositories. They also are comparable to an artifact type, i.e. "digest" (md5 or sha1).

Artifact file name extension

In some cases the artifact type already implies its file name extension, but not always. More generic types may include several different file formats, e.g. documentation can contain tarballs, zip packages or any common document formats.

Examples: zip, tar, tar.gz, rar, jar, war, ear, txt, doc, xml, html

Module Revision and Status

Module revision

A unique revision number or version name is assigned to each delivered unique state of a module. Ivy can help in generating revision numbers for module delivery and publishing revisions to repositories, but other aspects of revision control, especially source revisioning, must be managed with a separate version control system.

Therefore, to Ivy, a revision always corresponds to a delivered version of a module. It can be a public, shared or local delivery, a release, a milestone, or an integration build, an alpha or a beta version, a nightly build, or even a continuous build. All of them are considered revisions by Ivy.

Source revision

Source files kept under a version control system (like Subversion, CVS, SourceSafe, Perforce, etc.) have a separate revisioning scheme that is independent of the module revisions visible to Ivy. Ivy is unaware of any revisions of a module's source files.

In some cases, the SCM's source revision number could be used also as the module revision number, but that usage is very rare. They are still two different concepts, even if the module revision number was wholly or partially copied from the respective source revision number.

Branch

A branch corresponds to the standard meaning of a branch (or sometimes stream) in source control management tools.
The head, or trunk, or main stream, is also considered as a branch in Ivy.

Status of a revision

A module's status indicates how stable a module revision can be considered. It can be used to consolidate the status of all the dependencies of a module, to prevent the use of an integration revision of a dependency in the release of your module.

Three statuses are defined by default in Ivy:

• integration: revisions builded by a continuous build, a nightly build, and so on, fall in this category
• milestone: revisions delivered to the public but not actually finished fall in this category
• release: a revision fully tested and labelled fall in this category

Since 1.4 This list is configurable in your settings file.

Configurations of a module

A module configuration is a way to use or construct a module. If the same module has different dependencies based on how it's used, those distinct dependency-sets are called its configurations in Ivy.

Some modules may be used in different ways (think about hibernate which can be used inside or outside an application server), and this way may alter the artifacts you need (in the case of hibernate, jta.jar is needed only if it is used outside an application server).
Moreover, a module may need some other modules and artifacts only at build time, and some others at runtime. All those differents ways to use or build a module are called module configurations in ivy.

For more details on configurations and how they are used in ivy, please refer to the main concepts page.

Ivy Settings

Ivy settings files are xml files used to configure ivy to indicate where the modules can be found and how.

History of settings

Prior to Ivy 2.0, the settings files were called configuration files and usually named ivyconf.xml. This resulted in a confusion between module configurations and Ivy configuration files, so they were renamed to settings files. If you happen to fall on an ivyconf file or something called a configuration file, most of the time it's only unupdated information (documentation, tutorial or article). Feel free to report any problem like this, if you find such inconsistencies in this documentation.

Repository

What is called a repository in Ivy is a distribution site location where Ivy is able to find your required modules' artifacts and descriptors (i.e. Ivy files in most cases).
Ivy can be used with complex repositories configured very finely. You can use Dependency Resolvers to do so.

---

Dependency Resolver

A dependency resolver is a pluggable class in ivy which is used to:

• find dependencies ivy files
• download dependencies artifacts

The notion of artifact "downloading" is large: artifact can be on a web site, or on the local file system of your machine. The download is thus the fact to bring a file from a repository to ivy cache.

Moreover, the fact that it is the responsibility of the resolver to find ivy files and download artifacts help to implement various resolving strategies.

As you see, a dependency resolver can be thought as a class responsible of describing a repository.

If you want to see which resolvers are available in ivy, you can go to the corresponding configuration section

Module configurations explained

Module configurations are described in the terminology page as a way to use or construct a module. Configurations being a central part of Ivy, they need more explanations as a concept.

When you define a way to use or construct a module, you are able to define which artifacts are published by this module in this configuration, and you are also able to define which dependencies are needed in this configuration.

Moreover, because dependencies in ivy are expressed on modules and not on artifacts, it is important to be able to define which configurations of the dependency are required in the configuration you define of your module. That's what is called configuration mapping.

If you use only simple modules and do not want to worry about configurations, you don't have to worry about them. They're still there under the hood, cause ivy can't work without configuration. But most of the time if you declare nothing, ivy assumes that the artifacts of your module are published in all configurations, and that all the dependencies configurations are required in all configurations. And it works in simple cases. But whenever you want to separate things within a module, or get more control over things published and got through dependencies resolution, configuration may answer most of your needs.

For details on how to declare your module configurations, how declare in which configuration your artifacts are published, and how to declare configuration mapping, please refer to ivy file documentation. The configurations tutorial is also a good place to go to learn more about this concept.

Variables

During configuration, ivy allows to define what are called ivy variables. Ivy variables can be seen as ant properties, and are used in a very similar way. In particular, you use a properties tag in the configuration file to load a properties file containing ivy variables and their values.

But the main differences between ant properties and ivy variables are that ivy variables can be overriden, whereas ant
properties can't, and that they are defined in separate environment.

Actually all ant properties are imported into ivy variables when the configuration is done (if you call ivy from ant).
This means that if you define an ant property after the call to configure, it will not be available as an ivy variable.
On the other hand, ivy variables are NOT exported to ant, thus if you define ivy variables in ivy, do not try to use them as ant properties.

To use ivy variables, you just have to follow that same syntax as for ant properties:
${variablename}
where variablename is the name of the variable.

Finally, it's also important to be aware of the time of substitution of variables. This substitution is done as soon as possible. This means that when ivy encounter a reference to a variable, it tries to substitute it if such a variable is defined. Consequently, any later modification of the variable will not alter the value already substituted.

Moreover, in an ant environment, a bunch of variables are going to be set by default via the ant property file loading mechanism (actually they are first loaded as ant properties and then imported as ivy variables, see Ant Tasks), and even in the ant properties themselves there is going to be eager substitution on loading, effectively making it impossible to override some variable purely via the ivysettings.properties file. Some variables will really only be able to be overriden via ant properties because of this.

Moreover, it's also important to understand the difference between ivy variables and ivy pattern tokens.
See Patterns chapter below to see what pattern tokens are.

Patterns

Ivy patterns are used in many dependency resolvers and ivy tasks, and are a simple way to structure the way ivy works.

First let's give an example. You can for instance configure the file system dependency resolver by giving it
a pattern to find artifacts. This pattern can be like this:
myrepository/[organisation]/[module]/[type]s/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]

This pattern indicates that the repository we use is in a directory called myrepository.

In this directory we have directories having for name the name of the organisation of the module we look for.
Then we have a directory per module, each having for name the name of the module.
Then in module directories we find a directory per artifact type (jars, wars, ivys, ...), in which we find artifacts named by the artifact id, followed by an hyphen, then the revision, a dot, and the artifact extension.
Not too difficult to understand, isn't it ? That's it, you have understood the pattern concept !

To give a bit more explanation, a pattern is composed of tokens, which are replaced by actual values when evaluated for a particular artifact or module. Those tokens are different from variables because they are replaced differently for each artifact, whereas variables are usually given the same value.

You can mix variables and tokens in a pattern:
${repository.dir}/[organisation]/[module]/[type]s/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]

The tokens available depends on where the pattern is used (will it be evaluated with artifacts or modules, for instance).
But here are all the tokens currently available:

• [organisation]
the organisation name
• [module]
the module name
• [branch]
the branch name
• [revision]
the revision name
• [artifact]
the artifact name (or id)
• [type]
the artifact type
• [ext]
the artifact file extension
• [conf]
the configuration name
• [originalname] (since 1.4)
the original artifact name (including the extension)

Difference between type and extension are explained in ivy file documentation.

since 1.2 [organization] can be used instead of [organisation].

since 1.3 Optinal parts can be used in patterns.
This let the possibility to avoid some input when a token is not defined, instead of having only the token as blank. Parenthesis are used to delimit the optional part, and only one token can be found inside the parenthesis.
So if you surround a token with '(' and ')', any other text which is between the parenthesis will be ignored if the token has no value.

For instance, suppose the pattern: "abc(def[type]ghi)"
type = "jar" -> the substituted pattern: abcdefjarghi
type = null or "" -> the substitued pattern: abc

A more real life example:
The pattern

[artifact](-[revision]).[ext]

let you accept both myartifact-1.0.jar when a revision is set, and myartifact.jar (instead of myartifact-.jar) when no revision is set
This is particularly useful when you need to keep control on artifact names.

since 1.4 Extra attributes can be used as any other token in the patterns.

Latest Strategy

Ivy often needs to know which revision between two has to be considered the "latest". For knowing that, it uses the concept of latest strategy. Indeed, there are several way to consider a revision to be the latest.
You can choose an existing one or plug your own.

But before knowing which revision is the latest, ivy needs to be able to consider several revision of a module. Thus ivy has to get a list of files in a directory, and it uses the dependency resolver for that. So check if the dependency resolver you use is compatible with latest revisions before wondering why ivy do not manage to get your latest revision.

Finally, In order to get several revisions of a module, most of the time you need to use the [revision] token in your pattern, so that ivy gets all the files which match the pattern whatever the revision is. It's only then that the latest strategy is used to determine which of this revisions is the latest one.

Ivy has three built-in latest strategies:

• latest-time
it compares the revisions date to know which is the latest. While this is often a good strategy in terms of pertinence, it has the drawback to be costful to compute with distant repositories. If you use ivyrep, for example, ivy has to ask the http server what is the date of each ivy file before knowing which is the latest.
• latest-revision
it compares the revisions as string, using an algorithm close to the one used in the php version_compare function.
This algorithm takes into account special meaning of some text. For instance, with this strategy, 1.0-dev1 is considered before 1.0-alpha1, which in turn is before 1.0-rc1, which is before 1.0, which is before 1.0.1.
• latest-lexico
: it compares the revisions as string, using lexicographic order (the one used by java string comparison).

See also how to configure new latest strategies here.

Conflict Manager

A conflict manager is able to select, among a list of module revisions in conflict, a list of revisions to keep.
Yes, it can selects a list of revision, even if most conflicts manager select only one revision.
But in some cases you will need to keep several revisions, and load in separate class loaders, for example.

A list of revisions is said to be in conflict if they correspond to the same module, i.e. the same organisation/module name couple.

The list of available conflict managers is available on the conflict manager configuration page.

To have more details on how to setup your conflict managers by module, see conflicts section in ivy file reference.

Pattern matcher

since 1.3 At several places Ivy let uses pattern to match a set of objects. For instance, you can exclude several modules at once when declaring a dependency by using a pattern matching all the modules to exclude.

Ivy uses pluggable pattern matcher to match those object names. 3 are defined by default:

• exact
This matcher matches only string when they are equal to the pattern one
• regexp
This matcher let you use regular expression as supported by the Pattern class of java 1.4 or greater
• glob
This matcher let you use unix like glob matcher, i.e. where the only meta characters are * which matches any sequence of characters and ? which matches exactly one character. Note that this matcher is available only with jakarta oro 2.0.8 in your classpath.

Note also that with any matcher the character '*' has the special meaning of matching anything. This is particularly useful with default values which do not depend on the matcher.

Extra attributes

since 1.4 Several tags in ivy xml files are extensible with what is called extra attributes.
The idea is very simple: if you need some more information to define your modules, you can add the attribute you want and you will then be able to access it as any other attribute in your patterns for example.

since 2.0 It's possible and recommended to use xml namespaces for your extra attributes. Using an Ivy extra namespace is the easiest way to add your own extra attributes.

Example:
Here is an ivy file with the attribute 'color' set to blue:

<ivy-module version="2.0" xmlns:e="http://ant.apache.org/ivy/extra">
	<info organisation="apache"
	       module="foo"
	       e:color="blue"
	       status="integration"
	       revision="1.59"
	/>
</ivy-module>

Then you must use the extra attribute when you declare a dependency on foo. Those extra attributes
will indeed be used as identifier for the module like the org the name and the revision:

<dependency org="apache" name="foo" e:color="blue" rev="1.5+" />

And you can define your repository pattern as:

${repository.dir}/[organisation]/[module]/[color]/[revision]/[artifact].[ext]

Note that in patterns you must use the unqualified attribute name (no namespace prefix).

If you don't want to use xml namespaces, it's possible but you will need to disable ivy file validation, since your files won't fulffill anymore the official ivy xsd. See the settings documentation to see how to disable validation.

Checksums

since 1.4 Ivy allow to use checksums, also known as digester, to verify the correctness of a downloaded file.

For the moment Ivy supports md5 and sha1 algorithm.

The configuration of using md5 and/or sha1 can be done globally or by dependency resolver.
Globally, use the ivy.checksums variable to list the check to be done (only md5 and sha1 are supported).
On each resolver you can use the checksums attribute to override the global setting.

The setting is a comma separated list of checksum algorithm to use.
During checking (at download time), the first checksum found is checked, and that's all. This means that if you have a "sha1, md5" setting, then if ivy finds a sha1 file, it will compare the downloaded file sha1 against this sha1, and if the comparison is ok, it will assume the file is ok. If no sha1 file is found, it will look for a md5 file. If none is found no checking is done.
During publish, all listed checksum algorithms are computed and uploaded.

By default checksum algorithms are "sha1, md5".

If you want to change this default, you can set the variable ivy.checksums. Hence to disable checksum validation you just have to set ivy.checksums to "".

Events and Triggers

since 1.4 When Ivy performs the dependency resolution and some other tasks, it fires events before and after the most important steps. You can listen to these events using Ivy API, or you can even register a trigger to perform a particular action when a particular event occur.

This is a particularly powerful and flexible feature which allow for example to perform a build of a dependency just before it is resolved, or follow what's happening during the dependency resolution process accuratly, and so on.

For more details about event and triggers, see the triggers documentation page in the configuration section of this documentation.

Circular Dependencies

since 1.4 Circular dependencies can be either direct or indirect. For instance, if A depends on A it's a circular dependency, and if A depends on B which itself depends on A, this is also a circular dependency.

Prior to Ivy 1.4 circular dependencies where causing a failure in Ivy. As of Ivy 1.4, the behaviour of Ivy when it finds a circular dependency is configurable through a circular dependency strategy.

3 built-in strategies are available:

• ignore
circular dependencies are only signaled in verbose messages
• warn
same as ignore, except that they are signaled as warning (default)
• error
halt the dependency resolution when a circular dependency is found.

See the configuration page to see how to configure the circular dependency strategy you want to use.

Cache and Change Management

Ivy heavily relies on local cache(s) to avoid accessing remote repositories too often, thus saving a low of network bandwidth and time.

Cache types

Ivy cache is composed of two different parts:

• the repository cache
The repository cache is where Ivy stores data downloaded from module repositories, along with some meta information concerning these artifacts, like their original location.
This part of the cache can be shared if you use a well suited lock strategy.
• the resolution cache
This part of the cache is used to store resolution data, which is used by Ivy to reuse the results of a resolve process.
This part of the cache is overwritten each time a new resolve is performed, and should never be used by multiple processes at the same time.

While there is always only one resolution cache, you can define multiple repository caches, each resolver being able to use a separate cache.

Change management

To optimize the dependency resolution and the way the cache is used, Ivy assumes by default that a revision never changes. So once Ivy has a module in its cache (metadata and artifacts), it trusts the cache and do not even query the repository. This optimization is very useful in most cases, and causes no problem as long as you respect this paradigm: a revision never changes. Besides performance, there are several good reasons to follow this principle.

However, depending on your current build system and your dependency management strategy, you may prefer to update sometimes your modules. There are two kind of changes to consider:

Changes in module metadata

Since pretty often module metadata are not considered by module providers with as much attention as their API or behavior (if they even provide module metadata), it happens more than we would like that we have to update module metadata: a dependency has been forgotten, or another one is missing, ...

In this case, setting checkModified="true" on your dependency resolver will be the solution. This flag tells to Ivy to check if module metadata has been modified compared to the cache. Ivy first checks the metadata last modified timestamp on the repository to download it only if necessary, and then update it when needed.

Changes in artifacts

Some people, especially those coming from maven 2 land, like to use one special revision to handle often updated modules. In maven 2 this is called a SNAPSHOT version, and some argue that it helps saves disk space to keep only one version for the high number of intermediary builds you can make whilst developing.

Ivy supports this kind of approach with the notion of changing revision. A changing revision is just that: a revision for which Ivy should consider that the artifacts may change over time. To handle this, you can either specify a dependency as changing on the dependency tag, or use the changingPattern and changingMatcher attributes on your resolvers to indicate which revision or group of revisions should be considered as changing.

Once Ivy knows that a revision is changing, it will follow this principle to avoid checking your repository too often: if the module metadata has not changed, it will considered the whole module (including artifacts) as not changed. Even if the module descriptor file has changed, it will check the publication data of the module to see if this is a new publication of the same revision or not. Then if the publication date has changed, it will check the artifacts last modified timestamps, and download them accordingly.

So if you want to use changing revisions, use the publish task to publish your modules, it will take care of updating the publication date, and everything will work fine. And remember to set checkModified=true" on your resolver too!

Paths handling

As a dependency manager, Ivy has a lot of file related operations, which most of the time use paths or path patterns to locate the file on the filesystem.

These paths can obviously be relative or absolute. We recommend to always use absolute paths, so that you don't have to worry about what is the base of your relative paths. Ivy provides some variables which can be used as the base of your absolute paths. For instance, Ivy has a concept of base directory, which is basically the same as for Ant. You have access to this base directory with the ivy.basedir variable. So if you have a path like

${ivy.basedir}/ivy.xml

, you have an absolute path. In settings files, you also have a variable called ivy.settings.dir which points to the directory in which your settings file is located, which makes defining paths relative to this directory very easy.

If you really want to use relative paths, the base directory used to actually locate the file depends on where the relative path is defined:

• In an Ivy file, paths are relative to the Ivy file itself (the only possible path in an Ivy file is for configurations declaration inclusion)
• In settings files, paths for file inclusion (namely properties file loading and settings inclusion) are relative to the directory in which the settings file is located. All other paths must be absolute unless explicitly noted.
• In Ivy Ant tasks and Ivy parameters or options, paths are relative to Ivy base directory, which when called from Ant is the same as your Ant basedir.

---

Very often some concepts discussed in Ivy here, and especially those involving modules and dependencies, require to be discussed by text (e-mail, textual doc, console, ...), and so benefit from convention in this area.

The conventions have been adopted with Ivy 2.0 are the following:

what	pattern	example
a module without revision	[organisation]#[module]	org.apache.ant#ant
a module with revision	[organisation]#[module];[revision]	org.apache.ant#ant;1.7.0
a module with (some) configurations	[organisation]#[module][ [confs] ]	org.apache.ant#ant[master,compile,build]
a module with revision and (some) configurations	[organisation]#[module];[revision][ [confs] ]	org.apache.ant#ant;1.7.0[master,compile,build]
a module's artifact	[organisation]#[module]![artifact].[ext]([type])	org.apache.ant#ant!ant.jar(source)
a module's artifact with revision	[organisation]#[module];[revision]![artifact].[ext]([type])	org.apache.ant#ant;1.7.0!ant.jar(source)

Another usual text representation used is to represent dependencies using a dash followed by greater than sign: ->

To group a set of set of modules, we recommend using curly braces { }

With these conventions, it's easy to give a concise and detailed overview of a set of modules and their dependencies.

For instance:

#A;2-> { #B;[1.0,1.5] #C;[2.0,2.5] }
#B;1.4->#D;1.5
#B;1.5->#D;2.0
#C;2.5->#D;[1.0,1.6]

In full words here is how it could be written:

module A revision 2 depends on module B with the version constraint [1.0,1.5], and on module C with the version constraint [2.0,2.5].
module B revision 1.4 depends on module D revision 1.5.
module B revision 1.5 depends on module D revision 2.0.
module C revision 2.5 depends on module D with the version constraint [1.0,1.6].

As you can see using text conventions is much more concise.

Another benefit is that these conventions are usually used in Ivy console output, and can also be used in some cases to be parsed into Ivy objects (we use it for test cases for instance). To make sure text parsing works fine, we recommend using only a limited range of characters for each attributes of your module identifiers.

Here is the recommended characters set for each attribute:

• organisation
a-z A-Z 0-9 - / . _ + =
• module
a-z A-Z 0-9 - / . _ + =
• branch
a-z A-Z 0-9 - / . _ + =
• revision
a-z A-Z 0-9 - / . _ + = , [ ] { } ( ) : @
• artifact
a-z A-Z 0-9 - / . _ + =
• extension
a-z A-Z 0-9 - / . _ + =
• type
a-z A-Z 0-9 - / . _ + =

---

Now that you have been introduced to main ivy terminology and concepts, it is time to give some explanations about how ivy works.

Usual cycle of modules between different locations

More details on ant tasks here.

Configure

Ivy needs to be configured to be able to resolve your dependencies. This configuration is usually done with a configuration file, which defines a set of dependency resolvers. Each resolver is able to find ivy files and / or artifacts, given simple information such as organition, module, revision, artifact name, artifact type and artifact extension.

The configuration is also responsible for indicating which resolver should be used to resolve which module. This configuration is dependent only on your environment, i.e. where the modules and artifacts can be found.

A default configuration is used by ivy when none is given. This configuration uses ivyrep to resolve all modules.

Resolve

The resolve time is the moment when ivy actually resolve the dependencies of one module. It first needs to access the ivy file of the module for which it resolves the dependencies.

Then, for each dependency declared in this file, it asks the appropriate resolver (according to configuration) to find the module (i.e. either an ivy file for it, or its artifacts if no ivy file can be found). It also uses a filesystem based cache to avoid asking for a dependency if it is already in cache (at least if possible, which is not the case with latest revisions).

If the resolver is a composite one (i.e. a chain or a dual resolver), several resolvers may actually be called to find the module.

When the dependency module has been found, its ivy file is downloaded to ivy cache. Then ivy checks if it has itself dependencies, in which case it recursilvely traverse the graph of dependencies.

All over this traversal, conflict management are done to prevent the access to a module as soon as possible.

When ivy has traversed the whole graph, it asks to the resolvers to download the artifacts corresponding to each dependencies which are not already in cache and which have not been evicted by conflict managers. All downloads are made to ivy cache.

Finally, an xml report is generated in cache, which allows ivy to easily know what are all the dependencies of the module, without traversing the graph again.

After this resolve step, two main steps are possible: either build a path with artifacts in cache, or copy them to another directory structure.

Retrieve

What is called retrieve in ivy is the fact to copy artifacts from the cache to another directory structure. This is done using a pattern, which indicates to ivy where the files should be copied.

For this, ivy uses the xml report in cache corresponding to the module it should retrieve to know which artifacts should be copied.

It also checks if the files are not already copied to maximize performances.

Building a path from cache

In some cases, it is preferable to use artifacts directly from the cache. Ivy is able to use the xml report generated at resolve time to build a path of all artifacts required.

This can be particularly useful especially when building plug-ins for IDE.

Reports

Ivy is also able to generate readable reports describing the dependencies resolution.

This is done with a simple xsl transformation of the xml report generated at resolve time.

Publish

Finally, Ivy can be used to publish a particular version of a module in your repository, so that it becomes available for futher resolve. This task is usually called either manually or from a continuous integration server for example.

---

Here are some recommendations and best practices we have gathered throughout our experience and consultancies with our customers.

Add module descriptors for all your modules

In Ivy world, module descriptors are ivy files, which are basically simple xml files describing both what the module produce as artifact and its dependencies.

It is a good practice to write or download module descriptors for all the modules involved in your development, even for your third party dependencies, and even if they don't provide themselves such module descriptors.

First it will seem like an extra work, and require time. But when you will have several modules using the same third party library, and than you will only need to add one line to your ivy file to get this library and all its own dependencies that you really need (if you have good module descriptors in your repository, especially with the use of module configurations). It will also be very helpful when you want to upgrade a dependency. One single change in your module ivy file and you will get the updated version with its updated (or not) dependencies.

Therefore we recommend to add ivy files for all the modules in your repository, you can even enforce this rule by setting the allownomd attribute to false on your resolvers. Hence you shouldn't need to use the dependency artifact inclusion/exclusion/specification feature of Ivy, which should only be used in very specific cases.

Use your own enterprise repository

This is usually not a valid recommendation for open source projects, but for the enterprise world we strongly suggest to avoid relying on a public repository like maven ibiblio or ivyrep. Why? Well, there are a couple of reasons:

• control
The main problem with this kind of public repositories is that you don't have control over the repository. This means that if a module descriptor is broken you cannot easily fixed it. Sure you can use a chain between a shared repository and the public one and put your fixed module descriptor in the shared repository so that it hide the one on the public repository, but this makes repository browsing and maintenance cumbersome.
Even more problematic is the possible updates of the repository. We know that versions published in such repositories should be stable and not be updated, but we also frequently see that a module descriptor is buggy, or an artifact corrupted. We even see sometimes a new version published with the same name as the preceding one because the previous one was simply badly packaged. This can occur even to the best, it occurred to us with Ivy 1.2 :-) But then we decided to publish the new version with a different name, 1.2a. But if the repository manager allow such updates, this means that what worked before can break. It can thus break your build reproducibility.
• reliability
Maven repository is not particularly well known for its reliability (we often experience major slow down or even complete break of the site), and ivyrep is only supported by a small company (yes we are only a small company!). So slow down and site hang occurs also. And if the repository you rely on is down, this can cause major slow down in your development or release process.
• accuracy
a public repository usually contains much more than what you actually need. Is it a problem? We think so. We think that in an enterprise environment the libraries you use should step through some kind of validation process before being used in every projects of your company. And what better way to do so? Setup an enterprise repository with only the libraries you actually want to use. This will not only ensure a better quality of your application dependencies, but help to have the same versions everywhere, and even help when declaring your module dependencies, if you use a tool like IvyDE, the code completion will only show relevant information about your repository, with only the libraries you actually want to see.
• security
the artifacts you download from a module repository are often executable, and are thus involved in security concerns. Imagine a hacker replacing commons-lang by another version containing a virus? If you rely on a public repository to build your software, you expose it to a security risk. You can read more about that in this Forrester article.

Note that it's not because you use an enterprise repository that you have to build it entirely by hand. Ivy features an install task which can be used to install modules from a repository to another one, so it can be used to selectively install modules from a public repository to your enterprise repository, where you will then be able to ensure control, reliability and accuracy.

Always use patterns with at least organisation and module

Ivy is very flexible and can accomodate a lot of existing repositories, using the concept of patterns. But if your repository doesn't exist yet, we strongly recommend to always use the organisation and the module name in your pattern, even for private repository where you put only your own modules (which all the same organisation). Why? Because Ivy listing feature rely on the token it can find in the pattern. If you have no organisation token in your pattern, Ivy won't be able to list the (only?) organisation in your repository. And this can be a problem for code completion in IvyDE, for example, but also for repository wide tasks like install or repreport.

Public ivysettings.xml with public repositories

If you create a public repository, provide an url to corresponding ivysettings.xml. It's pretty easy to do, and if someone want to leverage your repository, he will just have to load it with settings with the url of your ivysettings.xml, or include it in its own configuration file, which makes it really easy to combine several public repositories.

Dealing with integration versions

Very often especially when working in a team or with several modules, you will need to rely on intermediate, non finalized versions of your modules. These versions are what we call integration versions, because their main objective is to be integrated with other modules to make and test an application or a framework.

If you follow the continuous integration paradigm across modules, these integration versions can be produced by a continuous integration server, very frequently.

So, how can you deal with these, possibly numerous, integration versions?

There are basically two ways to deal with them, both ways being supported by Ivy:

• use a naming convention like a special suffix
the idea is pretty simple, each time you publish a new integration of your module you give the same name to the version (in maven world this is for example 1.0-SNAPSHOT). The dependency manager should then be aware that this version is special because it changes over time, so that it does not trust its local cache if it already has the version, but check the date of the version on the repository and see if it hass changed. In Ivy this is supported using the changing attribute on a dependency or by configuring the changing pattern to use for all your modules.
• create automatically a new version for each
in this case you use either a build number or a timestamp to publish each new integration version with a new version name. Then you can use one of the numerous ways in Ivy to express a version constraint. Usually selecting the very latest one (using 'latest.integration' as version constraint) is enough.

So, which way is the best? As often, it depends on your context, and if one of the two was really bad it wouldn't be supported in Ivy :-)

But usually we recommend to use the second one, because using a new version each time you publish a new version better fits the version identity paradigm, and can make all your builds reproducible, even integration one. And this is interesting because it enables, with some work in your build system, to introduce a mechanism to promote an integration build to a more stable status, like a milestone or a release.

Imagine you have a customer which comes on a monday morning and asks your latest version of your software, for testing or demonstration purpose. Obviously he needs it for the afternoon :-) Now if you have a continuous integration process and a good tracking of your changes and your artifacts, it may occur that you are actually able to fulfill his request without needing the use of a dolorean to give you some more time :-) But it may occur also that your latest version stable enough to be used for the purpose of the customer was actually built a few days ago, because the very latest just break a feature or introduce a new one you don't want to deliver. In this case, you can deliver this 'stable' integration build if you want, but be sure that a few days, or weeks, or even months later, the customer will ask for a bug fix on this demo only version. Why? Because it's a customer, and we all know how they are :-)

So, with a build promotion feature of any build in your repository, the solution would be pretty easy: when the customer ask for the version, you not only deliver the integration build, but you also promote it to a milestone status, for example. this promotion indicates that you should keep track of this version in a long period, to be able to come back to it and create a branch if needed.

Unfortunately Ivy does not by its own allow to have such reproducible builds out of the box, simply because Ivy is a dependency manager, not a build tool. But if you publish only versions with a distinct name and use Ivy features like versions constraint replacement during the publication or recursive delivery of modules, it can really help.

On the other hand, the main drawback of this solution is that it can produce a lot of intermediate versions, and you will have to run some cleaning scripts in your repository unless your company name starts with a G and ends with oogle :-)

Inlining dependencies or not?

With Ivy 1.4 you can resolve a dependency without even writing an ivy file. This pratice is called inlining. But what is it good for, and when should it be avoided?

Putting ivy dependencies in a separate file has the following advantages:

• separate revision cycle
if your dependencies may change more often than your build, it's a good idea to separate the two, to isolate the two concepts: describing how to build / describing your project dependencies
• possibility to publish
if you describe dependencies of a module which can itself be reused, you will ant to publish it to a repository. In this case the publication is only possible if you have a separate ivy file
• more flexible
inline dependencies can only be used to express one dependency and only one. An ivy file can be used to express much more complex dependencies

On the other hand, using inline dependencies is very useful when:

• you want to use a custom task in your ant build
Without ivy you usually either copy the custom task jar in ant lib, which requires maintenance of your workstation installation, or use a manual copy or download and a taskdef with the appropriate classpath, which is better. But if you have several custom tasks, or if they have themselves dependencies, it can become cumbersome. Using Ivy with an inline dependency is an elegant way to solve this problem.
• you want to easily deploy an application
If you already build your application and its modules using Ivy, it is really easy to leverage your ivy repository to download your application and all its dependencies on the local filesystem, ready to be executed. If you also put your configuration files as artifacts in your repository (maybee packaged as a zip), the whole installation process can rely on ivy, easing the automatic installation of any version of your application available in your repository!

Hire an expert

Build and dependency management is often considered with a too low level priority in the software development world. We often see build management implemented by developers when they have time. Even if this may seem like a time and money saving in the short term, it often turns out to be a very bad choice in the long term. Building software is not a simple task, when you want to ensure automatic, tested, fully reproducible builds, releases and installations. On the other hand, once a good build system fitting your very specific needs is setup, it can then only rely on a few people with a good understanding of what is going on, with a constant quality ensured.

Therefore hiring a build and dependency expert to analyse and improve your build and release system is most of the time a very good choice.

Feedback

These best practices are the reflect of our own experience, but we do not pretend to own the unique truth about dependency management or even Ivy use.

So feel free to comment on this page to add your own experience feedback, suggestions or opinion.

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There are basically two way to install Ivy. Either manually or automatically.

Manually

Download the version you want here, unpack the downloaded zip file wherever you want, and copy the ivy jar file in your ant lib directory (ANT_HOME/lib).

If you use ant 1.6.0 or superior, you can then simply go to the src/example/hello-ivy dir and run ant: if the build is successful, you have successfully installed Ivy !

If you use ant 1.5.1 or superior, you have to modify the build files in the examples:
- remove the namespace section at their head: xmlns:ivy="antlib:org.apache.ivy.ant"
- add taskdefs for ivy tasks:

  <taskdef name="ivy-configure" classname="org.apache.ivy.ant.IvyConfigure"/>
  <taskdef name="ivy-resolve" classname="org.apache.ivy.ant.IvyResolve"/>
  <taskdef name="ivy-retrieve" classname="org.apache.ivy.ant.IvyRetrieve"/>
  <taskdef name="ivy-publish" classname="org.apache.ivy.ant.IvyPublish"/> 

- replace ivy:xxx tasks by ivy-xxx
You can now run the build, if it is successful, you have successfully installed Ivy !

If the build is not successful, check the FAQ to see what can be the problem with the ivyrep resolver.

Ivy dependendencies

One of the two binary versions of Ivy doesn't include the optional dependencies. To download them using Ivy, all you need is to run the Ant build file provided in the distribution. This will use Ivy itself to download the dependencies. Then you should see the Ivy optional dependencies in the lib directory, organized per configuration (see the ivy.xml for details about the configurations and their use).

Automatically

If you want to use Ivy only in your ant build scripts, and have an internet connection when you build, you can download Ivy from this site and use the downloaded version automatically, using this simple build snippet:

    <property name="ivy.install.version" value="2.0.0-beta1" />
    <condition property="ivy.home" value="${env.IVY_HOME}">
      <isset property="env.IVY_HOME" />
    </condition>
    <property name="ivy.home" value="${user.home}/.ant" />
    <property name="ivy.jar.dir" value="${ivy.home}/lib" />
    <property name="ivy.jar.file" value="${ivy.jar.dir}/ivy.jar" />

    <target name="download-ivy" unless="offline">

        <mkdir dir="${ivy.jar.dir}"/>
        <!-- download Ivy from web site so that it can be used even without any special installation -->
        <get src="http://www.apache.org/dist/ant/ivy/${ivy.install.version}/ivy.jar"
            dest="${ivy.jar.file}" usetimestamp="true"/>
    </target>

    <target name="init-ivy" depends="download-ivy">
      <!-- try to load ivy here from ivy home, in case the user has not already dropped
              it into ant's lib dir (note that the latter copy will always take precedence).
              We will not fail as long as local lib dir exists (it may be empty) and
              ivy is in at least one of ant's lib dir or the local lib dir. -->
        <path id="ivy.lib.path">
            <fileset dir="${ivy.jar.dir}" includes="*.jar"/>

        </path>
        <taskdef resource="org/apache/ivy/ant/antlib.xml"
                 uri="antlib:org.apache.ivy.ant" classpathref="ivy.lib.path"/>
    </target>

Then the only thing to do is to add the init-ivy target in the depends attribute of your targets using Ivy, and add ivy namespace to your build script. See the self contained go-ivy example for details about this.

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In order to work as you want, ivy sometimes need some settings. Actually, ivy can work with no specific settings at all, see the default settings documentation for details about that. But ivy is able to work in very different contexts. You just have to configure it properly.

Settings are specified through an xml file, usually called ivysettings.xml. To configure ivy from ant, you just have to use the settings datatype with the path of your settings file.

Here is an example of settings file :

<ivysettings>
        <properties file="${ivy.settings.dir}/ivysettings-file.properties" />
        <settings defaultCache="${cache.dir}" defaultResolver="ibiblio" checkUpToDate="false" />
        <resolvers>
                <ibiblio name="ibiblio" />
                <filesystem name="internal">
                        <ivy pattern="${repository.dir}/[module]/ivy-[revision].xml" />
                        <artifact pattern="${repository.dir}/[module]/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]" />
                </filesystem>
        </resolvers>
        <modules>
                <module organisation="jayasoft" name=".*" resolver="internal" />
        </modules>
</ivysettings>

Mainly, the settings enable to configure the default cache directory used by ivy and the dependency resolvers that it will use to resolve dependencies.
Note: To work, this settings file needs a property file named ivysettings-file.properties in the same directory as the settings file, with ivy variables you want in it.

Some useful variables are available in settings files:

• ivy.settings.dir
this variable references the directory in which the ivysettings itself is. This is available if the settings has been loaded as a file. In case of an url, it takes the part before the last slash of the url, if any. If the url has no slash, then this variable is not set.
• ivy.settings.file
the path of the settings file itself, it has been loaded as a file only. If it has been loaded as an url, this variable is not set
• ivy.settings.url
the url pointing to the settings file. This is set both when it has been loaded as a file or an url

since 1.4 Note that all java system properties are available as ivy variables in your settings file.

Settings file structure

The settings file is structured in some parts and left other open. Indeed each resolver has its own structure, thus it's not the settings file itself which define the structure for the resolvers.

ivysettings
    property
    properties
    settings
    include
    classpath
    typedef
    credentials
    lock-strategies
    caches
        cache
    latest-strategies
    version-matchers
    triggers
    parsers
    conflict-managers
    outputters
    namespaces
        namespace
            rule
                fromsystem
                    src
                    dest
                tosystem
                    src
                    dest
    macrodef
        attribute
        any resolver
    resolvers
        any resolver
    modules
        module
    statuses
        status

ivysettings

Tag: ivysettings

Root tag of any ivysettings file.

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
property	set an ivy variable	0..n
properties	loads a properties file as ivy variables	0..n
settings	configures ivy with some defaults	0..1
include	includes another settings file	0..n
classpath	add a location in the classpath used to load plugins	0..n
typedef	defines new types in ivy	0..n
lock-strategies	defines lock strategies	0..1
caches	defines repository cache managers	0..1
latest-strategies	defines latest strategies	0..1
parsers	defines module descriptor parsers	0..1
version-matchers	defines new version matchers	0..1
triggers	register triggers on ivy events	0..1
namespaces	defines new namespaces	0..1
macrodef	defines a new macro resolver	0..n
resolvers	defines dependency resolvers	0..1
conflict-managers	defines conflicts managers	0..1
modules	defines rules between modules and dependency resolvers	0..1
outputters	defines the list of available report outputters	0..1
statuses	defines the list of available statuses	0..1

---

Tag: property

Defines an ivy variable. since 1.3 The optional override attribute enables to avoid overriding the previous value of the varable, which makes the definition behave like ant properties, which is particularly useful to define default values (values which are used only if they haven't been defined yet).

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
name	the name of the variable to define	Yes
value	the new value the variable must take	Yes
override	true if the previous value (if any) of the variable should overriden, false otherwise	No, defaults to true

Examples

<property name="myvar" value="myvalue"/>

Sets the variable myvar to the value myvalue.

---

<property name="myvar" value="myvalue" override="false"/>

Sets the variable myvar to the value myvalue only if myvar has not been set yet.

---

Tag: properties

Loads a properties file into ivy variables. See variables chapter above for details about ivy variables.

Since 2.0: it is possible to access environment variables. This can be done by specifying the environment attribute. This attribute specifies the prefix which can be used to access these environment variables. For instance, if you specify environment="env", you can access the PATH environment variable with the env.PATH property name.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
file	a path to a properties file to load	One of these
environment	the prefix to use when retrieving environment variables (since 2.0)
override	indicates if the variable found in the properties file should override their previous value, if any (since 1.3)	No, defaults to true

---

Tag: settings

Configures some important ivy info: default resolver, latest strategy, conflict manager... Default resolver is used whenever nothing else is configured in the modules section of the settings file. It should give the name of a dependency resolver defined in the resolvers section of the settings file.

Default latest strategy and conflict manager can also be configured here.

validate indicates if ivy files should generally be validated against the xsd or not. This setting is only a default value, and can be overridden:
1) in ant tasks
2) in resolvers
So if there is a setting in the resolver, it always wins against all other settings.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
defaultResolver	the name of the default resolver to use	No, but all modules should be configured in the modules section if not provided
defaultLatestStrategy	the name of the default latest strategy to use	No, defaults to latest-revision
defaultConflictManager	the name of the default conflict manager to use	No, defaults to latest-revision
defaultBranch	the default branch to use for all modules, except if they have a module specific branch setting. since 1.4	No, defaults to no default branch
defaultResolveMode	the default resolve mode to use for all modules, except if they have a module specific resolve mode setting. since 2.0	No, defaults to 'default'
circularDependencyStrategy	the name of the circular dependency strategy to use since 1.4	No, defaults to warn
validate	Indicates if ivy files should be validated against ivy.xsd or not.	No, defaults to true
useRemoteConfig	true to configure ivyrep and ibiblio resolver from a remote configuration file (updated with changes in those repository structure if any) (since 1.2)	No, defaults to false
httpRequestMethod	specifies the HTTP method to use to retrieve information about an URL. Possible values are 'GET' and 'HEAD'. This setting can be used to solve problems with firewalls and proxies. (since 2.0)	No, defaults to 'HEAD'
defaultCache	a path to a directory to use as default basedir for both resolution and repository cache(s). Deprecated, we recommend using defaultCacheDir on the caches tag instead	No, defaults to .ivy2/cache in user home
checkUpToDate	Indicates if date should be checked before retrieving artifacts from cache. Deprecated, we recommend using checkUpToDate on the caches tag instead	No, defaults to true
cacheIvyPattern	a pattern to indicate where ivy files should be put in cache. Deprecated, we recommend using ivyPattern on the caches tag instead	No, defaults to [organisation]/[module]/ivy-[revision].xml
cacheArtifactPattern	a pattern to indicate where artifact files should be put in cache. Deprecated, we recommend using artifactPattern on the caches tag instead	No, defaults to [organisation]/[module]/[type]s/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]

---

Tag: include

Includes another ivysettings file as if it were part of this one. since 1.3 The included ivysettings file has to be a complete well formed ivysettings file, i.e. it does have to include the

<ivysettings>

tag.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
url	a URL to the ivysettings file to include	Yes, unless file is specified
file	a path to the ivysettings file to include	Yes, unless url is specified

Examples

<ivysettings>
  <property name="myrepository" value="path/to/my/real/rep"/>
  <settings defaultResolver="default"/>
  <include file="path/to/ivysettings-default.xml"/>
</ivysettings>

with ivysettings-default.xml:

<ivysettings>
  <property name="myrepository" value="path/to/rep" overwrite="false"/>
  <resolvers>
    <ivyrep name="default" ivyroot="${myrepository}"/>
  </resolvers>
</ivysettings>

The included ivysettings defines a resolver named default, which is an ivyrep resolver, with its root configured as being the value of myrepository variable. This variable is given the value path/to/rep in the included file, but because the attribute overwrite is set to false, it will not override the value given in the main ivysettings including this one, so the value used for myrepository will be path/to/my/real/rep.

---

<ivysettings>
  <include file="ivysettings-macro.xml"/>
  <resolvers>
    <mymacro name="includeworks" mymainrep="included/myrep" mysecondrep="included/secondrep"/>
  </resolvers>
</ivysettings> 

with ivysettings-macro.xml being the ivysettings example given on the macrodef documentation page.
This let reusing macro resolver easy.

---

Tag: classpath

Includes a jar in the classpath used to load plugins. since 1.4 This let you add ivy plugins without relying on ant classpath for instance, easing therefore the use of ivy in multiple execution environment (ant, standalone, IDE plugins, ...).

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
url	the url of a jar to add to the classpath	Yes, unless file is specified
file	a jar to add to the classpath	Yes, unless url is specified

Examples

<ivysettings>
  <classpath file="${ivy.settings.dir}/custom-resolver.jar"/>
  <typedef name="custom" classname="org.apache.ivy.resolver.CustomResolver"/>
  <resolvers>
    <custom name="custom"/>
  </resolvers>
</ivysettings>

Adds custom-resolver.jar found in the same directory as the ivysettings.xml file itself to the classpath, then define a custom resolver and use it.

---

<ivysettings>
  <classpath url="http://www.myserver.com/ivy/custom-resolver.jar"/>
  <typedef name="custom" classname="org.apache.ivy.resolver.CustomResolver"/>
  <resolvers>
    <custom name="custom"/>
  </resolvers>
</ivysettings>

Same as above, but find the jar on a web server.

---

Tag: typedef

Defines a new type in ivy. Useful to define new dependency resolvers, in particular, but also latest strategies. See how to write and plug your own dependency resolver for details.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
name	the name of the type to define. This name is then used as an xml tag.	Yes
classname	the fully qualified class name of the type to define.	Yes

---

Tag: credentials

Configures HTTP authentication credentials. since 2.0.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
host	the name of the host	Yes
realm	the name of the realm	No
username	the username	Yes
passwd	the password	Yes

---

Tag: lock-strategies since 2.0 Defines a list of lock strategies usable in Ivy. A lock strategy is used by a cache manager to decide when and how locking should be performed (see settings/cache to see how to configure the lock strategy to use).

Two lock strategies are registered by default:

• no-lock
This lock strategy actually performs no locking at all, and thus should not be used in environment where the cache is shared by multiple processes.

This strategy is implemented by (NoLockStrategy)


• artifact-lock
This strategy acquire a lock whenever a module descriptor or an artifact is downloaded to the cache, which makes a good solution when you want to share your repository cache.

Note that this strategy is based on file locking, performed by default using the java.io.File.createNewFile() atomicity (which is documented as atomic in the javadoc, but not recommended to perform locks). A java.nio.FileLock based implementation is also provided, but according to our tests the createNewFile based one performs better and more reliably. We heavily recommend making your own testing in your target environment before relying on this lock strategy for heavily concurrent operations.

This strategy is implemented by (ArtifactLockStrategy)

The child tag used for the lock strategy must be equal to a name of a lock strategy type (added with the typedef tag).

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
any lock strategy	adds a lock strategy to the list of available ones	0..n

---

Tag: caches

Configures the Ivy cache system. since 2.0.
See cache concept for details on the Ivy cache concept.

By default, Ivy defines one repository cache instance, called 'default-cache', which uses the default cache settings defined using attributes on this tag. This default instance is defined as long as you don't define your own default cache using the 'default' attribute, and have at least one dependency resolver which doesn't specify which cache instance to use.

defaultCacheDir is the default directory used for both the resolution and repository cache(s). It usually points to a directory in your filesystem. If you want to isolate resolution cache from repository cache, we recommend setting both the resolutionCacheDir and repositoryCacheDir attributes on this tag instead of using defaultCacheDir.

Since repository cache implementations are pluggable, you can either define new cache instances based on the default implementation provided in Ivy using the cache child element, or use custom cache implementations using child elements as you have defined using typedef.

ivyPattern and artifactPattern are used to configure the default way Ivy stores ivy files and artifacts in repository cache(s). Usually you do not have to change this, unless you want to use the cache directly from another tool, which is not recommended. These patterns are relative to the repository cache base directory.

checkUpToDate indicates to ivy if it must check date of artifacts before retrieving them (i.e. copying them from
cache to another place in your filesystem). Usually it is a good thing to check date to avoid unnecessary copy, even if it's most of the time a local copy.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
default	the name of the default cache to use on all resolvers not defining the cache instance to use	No, defaults to a default cache manager instance named 'default-cache'
defaultCacheDir	a path to a directory to use as default basedir for both resolution and repository cache(s)	No, defaults to .ivy2/cache in the user's home directory
resolutionCacheDir	the path of the directory to use for all resolution cache data	No, defaults to defaultCacheDir
repositoryCacheDir	the path of the default directory to use for repository cache data. This should not point to a directory used as a repository!	No, defaults to defaultCacheDir
ivyPattern	default pattern used to indicate where ivy files should be put in the repository cache(s)	No, defaults to [organisation]/[module]/ivy-[revision].xml
artifactPattern	default pattern used to indicate where artifact files should be put in the repository cache(s)	No, defaults to [organisation]/[module]/[type]s/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]
checkUpToDate	Indicates if date should be checked before retrieving artifacts from cache	No, defaults to true
useOrigin	the default value to use for useOrigin for caches in which it isn't specifically defined. Use true to avoid the copy of local artifacts to the cache and use directly their original location.	No, defaults to false
lockStrategy	the name of the default lock strategy to use when accessing repository cache(s)	No, defaults to no-lock

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
cache	defines a new repository cache instance, based on the default repository cache implementation	0..n

Examples

<caches>
  <cache name="mycache" basedir="path/to/my/cache/1" />
  <cache name="mycache2" basedir="path/to/my/cache/2" />
</caches> 

Define 2 cache instances, named mycache and mycache2, using two different directories as base directory, and using the default patterns and lock strategies. The default cache instance will still be defined as long as at least one dependency resolver does not declare which cache manager to use.

---

---

Tag: cache

Since 2.0.

Defines a repository cache instance based on the default repository cache implementation. The default repository cache implementation caches files on the local filesystem in subdirectories of a configured base directory.

By default also, the parsed module descriptor read from the cache are kept in a memory cache in case they are reused. This may enhance the performance of multi-module build, provided that all modules are build using the same ivy instance. The size of this memory cache is configurable in term of number of module descriptors. A size of 0 means no memory caching.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
name	name of the cache instance	Yes
basedir	the path of the base directory to use to put repository cache data. This should not point to a directory used as a repository!	No, defaults to repositoryCacheDir defined in caches
ivyPattern	the pattern to use to store cached ivy files	No, defaults to default cache ivy pattern as configured in caches
artifactPattern	the pattern to use to store cached artifacts	No, defaults to default cache artifact pattern as configured in caches
useOrigin	true to avoid the copy of local artifacts to the cache and use directly their original location, false otherwise. To know if an artifact is local ivy asks to the resolver. Only filesystem resolver is considered local by default, but this can be disabled if you want to force the copy on one filesystem resolver and use the original location on another. Note that it is safe to use useOrigin even if you use the cache for some non local resolvers. In this case the cache will behave as usual, copying files to the cache. Note also that this only applies to artifacts, not to ivy files, which are still copied in the cache.	No. defaults to the default value configured in caches
lockStrategy	the name of the lock strategy to use for this cache	No, defaults to default lock strategy as configured in caches
defaultTTL	the default TTL to use when no specific one is defined	No, defaults to ${ivy.cache.ttl.default}
memorySize	the number of parsed module descriptors to keep in a memory cache.	No, default to 150

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
ttl	defines a TTL rule	0..n

Examples

<cache name="mycache" 
       basedir="/path/to/mycache"
       ivyPattern="[module]/ivy-[revision].xml" 
       artifactPattern="[module]/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]"
       lockStrategy="no-lock"
       defaultTTL="1s">
    <ttl revision="latest.integration" duration="200ms" />
    <ttl organisation="org1" duration="10m 20s" />
    <ttl organisation="org2" duration="5h" />
    <ttl organisation="org3" duration="2d 12h" />
</cache>

Defines a cache called 'mycache', storing files in the '/path/to/mycache' directory using '[module]/ivy-[revision].xml' as pattern to store Ivy files and '[module]/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]' as pattern to store other artifacts.
The lock strategy used by this cache is the 'no-lock' strategy, which does not perform any locking.
The defaultTTL used is of 1s, meaning that by default dynamic revision result will be stored and used for one second. TTL rules then define that all 'latest.integration' revisions will be stored and used for 200ms, while other dynamic revisions from org1 org2 and org3 modules will be stored respectively for 10 minutes 20 seconds; 5 hours; and 2 days and 12 hours.

---

Tag: ttl

Since 2.0 Defines a TTL (Time To Live) rule for resolved revision caching. When Ivy resolves a dynamic version constraint (like latest.integration or a version range), it can store the result of the resolution (like latest.integration=1.5.1) for a given time, called TTL. It means that Ivy will reuse this dynamic revision resolution result without accessing the repositories for the duration of the TTL, unless running resolve in refresh mode.

This tag let you define a rule to define a TTL specific to a set of dynamic revision, based on the whole module revision information (organization, module name, revision, ...). The revision considered in the rule is the revision before the resolution (for instance 'latest.integration') and not the resolved revision (for instance '1.5.1').

The rules are evaluated in order, the first matching rule being used to define the TTL. If no rule matches, the cache defaultTTL will be used.

The format used to specify the TTL is of the form:

XXd XXh XXm XXs XXXms

Where 'd' stands for days, 'h' for hours, 'm' for minutes, 's' for seconds and 'ms' for milliseconds. Any part of the specification can be omitted, so '12d', '2h 5m' and '1d 5ms' are all valid.

Using a 0ms TTL disable resolved revision caching for the given rule.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
organisation	the organisation to match to apply the rule.	No, defaults to *
module	the module's name to match to apply the rule.	No, defaults to *
revision	the module's revision to match to apply the rule. Note that the version is not resolved when evaluating the rule ('latest.integration' for instance).	No, defaults to *
any extra attribute	an extra attribute to match to apply the rule.	No, defaults to *
matcher	the matcher to use to match the modules to which the resolver should be applied	No, defaults to exact
duration	the TTL to apply	Yes

---

Tag: latest-strategies

Defines a list of latest strategies usable in ivy. Each latest strategy is identified by its name, given as an attribute.
The child tag used for the latest strategy must be equal to a name of a latest strategy type (usually added with the typedef tag).

The latest strategies which are always included in ivy (and do not require anything in the configuration file) are:

• latest-time
compares the revisions date to know which is the latest. While this is often a good
strategy in terms of pertinence, it has the drawback to be costful to compute with distant repositories. If you use ivyrep,
for example, ivy has to ask the http server what is the date of each ivy file before knowing which is the latest.
• latest-revision
compares the revisions as string, using an algorithm close to the one used in the php version_compare function.
This algorithm takes into account special meaning of some text. For instance, with this strategy, 1.0-dev1 is considered
before 1.0-alpha1, which in turn is before 1.0-rc1, which is before 1.0, which is before 1.0.1.
• latest-lexico
compares the revisions as string, using lexicographic order (the one used by java string comparison).

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
any latest strategy	adds a latest strategy to the list of available strategies	0..n

latest-revision

since 1.4 The latest-revision can now be configured to handle more words with special meanings than the one defined in php version_compare function.

Here is an example of how you can do so:

<latest-strategies>
  <latest-revision name="mylatest-revision">
    <specialMeaning name="PRE" value="-2"/>
    <specialMeaning name="QA" value="4"/>
    <specialMeaning name="PROD" value="5"/>
  </latest-revision>
</latest-strategies> 

Knowing that the default special meaning words are the following:

    <specialMeaning name="dev" value="-1"/>
    <specialMeaning name="rc" value="1"/>
    <specialMeaning name="final" value="2"/>

You can even get rid or redefine the default special meanings by setting usedefaultspecialmeanings="false" on the latest-revision tag.
Example:

<latest-strategies>
  <latest-revision name="mylatest-revision" usedefaultspecialmeanings="false">
    <specialMeaning name="pre" value="-2"/>
    <specialMeaning name="m" value="1"/>
    <specialMeaning name="rc" value="2"/>
    <specialMeaning name="prod" value="3"/>
  </latest-revision>
</latest-strategies> 

---

Tag: parsers

Defines a list of module descriptor parsers usable in ivy. Each parser defines which resources (which descriptor file) it accepts.
The child tag used for the parser must be equal to a name of a parser type (added with the typedef tag).

Note that when looking for a parser, ivy queries the parsers list in the reverse order. So the last parser in the list will be queried first. Consequently, if the last parser accepts all resources, the other parsers will never have a chance to parse the resource.

Two parsers are available by default and thus do not need to be declared in this section:

• ivy file parser
this is the parser used for ivy xml files. This parser is used for resources that aren't accepted by any other parser.
• pom parser
this parser is able to parse maven2 pom files

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
any module descriptor parser	adds a module descriptor parser to the list of available parsers	0..n

---

Tag: namespaces

Namespaces are an advanced feature of Ivy which let you use resolvers in which module names and organisations are not consistent between each other. For instance, if you want to use maven2 repository and ivyrep collectively, you will face some naming issues. For example all apache commons projects are declared to be part of the organisation apache in ivyrep whereas in maven2 ibiblio repository, they are declared to be part of the organisation of the same name of the module.

So if you try to use both maven2 and ivyrep repositories, you will face some issues like:
How do I declare a dependency on commons-lang ?
I have an error while trying to resolve module xxx. It says that it depends on [commons-httpclient commons-httpclient] ant that it isn't available.
...
Ivy has an answer to give to this kind of troubles, and this answer is called namespaces. In short, you can affect a namespace to each dependency resolver in Ivy, and each namespace defines rules to convert names from the system namespace to the defined namespace itself, and vice versa.

This very powerful feature is thoroughly used in the build your own repository tutorial, and this is a good place to have examples of what can be done with namespaces.

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
namespace	defines a new namespace	0..n

---

Tag: namespace

Defines a new namespace. A namespace is identified by a name, which is used to reference the namespace in the resolvers using the namespace. Namespaces overview is given in the namespaces documentation.

A namespace mainly consists of a list of rules, each rule defining a translation between system namespace and the defined namespace, and vice versa.

There are two main possibilities for using these rules. By default, a namespace iterate through the rules, and when it finds one that translate the given name, it returns the translated name. But the namespace can be configured to do use the list as a translator chain: in this case, all rules are applied in order, the result of the first rule translation being passed to the second, and so on.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
name	the namespace name	Yes
chainrules	true to indicate that namespaces rules should be chained, false otherwise	No, defaults to false

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
rule	defines a new namespace rule	0..n

Example

<namespace name="test">
  <rule>
    <fromsystem>
      <src org="systemorg"/>
      <dest org="A"/>
    </fromsystem>
    <tosystem>
      <src org="A"/>
      <dest org="systemorg"/>
    </tosystem>
  </rule>
</namespace>

<namespace name="test">
  <rule>
    <fromsystem>
      <src org="systemorg2" module="system\-(.+)"/>
      <dest org="B" module="$m1"/>
    </fromsystem>
    <tosystem>
      <src org="B" module=".+"/>
      <dest org="systemorg2" module="system-$m0"/>
    </tosystem>
  </rule>
</namespace>

<namespace name="test" chainrules="true">
  <rule>
    <fromsystem>
      <src org="systemorg"/>
      <dest org="A"/>
    </fromsystem>
    <tosystem>
      <src org="A"/>
      <dest org="systemorg"/>
    </tosystem>
  </rule>
  <rule>
    <fromsystem>
      <src module="systemmod"/>
      <dest module="A"/>
    </fromsystem>
    <tosystem>
      <src module="A"/>
      <dest module="systemmod"/>
    </tosystem>
  </rule>
  <rule>
    <fromsystem>
      <src module="systemmod2"/>
      <dest module="B"/>
    </fromsystem>
    <tosystem>
      <src module="B"/>
      <dest module="systemmod2"/>
    </tosystem>
  </rule>
</namespace>

---

Tag: rule

Defines a new namespace rule. A rule defines a translation between system namespace and the defined namespace, and vice versa. See namespace doc for details.

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
fromsystem	defines the translation to apply from system namespace to the defined namespace	1
tosystem	defines the translation to apply from the defined namespace to system namespace	1

---

Tag: fromsystem / tosystem

Defines a one way translation rule, i.e. a translation from system namespace to the defined namespace or vice versa.

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
src	defines a source name which can be accepted	1..n
dest	defines the translation to apply when a name is accepted by an src pattern	1

---

Tag: src

Defines the acceptation part of a translation rule. If a name matches this src, it will be translated using the dest part.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
org	the organisation to match as a regexp	No, defaults to .*
module	the module name to match as a regexp	No, defaults to .*
rev	the revision to match as a regexp	No, defaults to .*

---

Tag: dest

Defines the translation part of a translation rule. If a name has matched a corresponding src, it will be translated using this dest part. The new names can contain references to groups of the matched name, using a slightly modified regexp syntax. Indeed, referenced groups can be part of either the organisation, module or revision part of the original name. So, to reference the groups, you just have to add a letter identifying the part in which the group should be selected: o for organisation, m for module, and r for revision.

For instance, $o0 matches the whole matched organisation, and $m0 the whole matched module name. $o1 matches the first group of the matched organisation.

For details about regexp and groups, see the Pattern class documentation in the jdk.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
org	the new organisation name	No, defaults to $o0
module	the new module name	No, defaults to $m0
rev	the new revision	No, defaults to $r0

Examples

    <fromsystem>
      <src org="systemorg2" module="system\-(.+)"/>
      <dest org="B" module="$m1"/>
    </fromsystem>

Matches modules from systemorg2 which have a name beginning with system followed by a minus and anything else, and translate it to organisation B and module the part following

system-

of the original name.

---

Tag: macrodef

Defines a new dependency resolver type based upon an other one. This definition is very similar to the macrodef feature of ant for defining macro tasks. since 1.3 This task eases the lot the process of creating new dependency resolver, because it avoid writing java code.

It is generally used in combination with the include feature to help reusing macro at several places.

A macro is defined by writing the resolver it is equivalent to as if it were written in the resolver place, except that you can use attributes to pass parameters to the newly defined resolver type. Attributes are defined with a name and sometimes a default value, and are used using the following syntax:

@{attributename}

Resolvers names

Since you can use the same macro several times, and that your macro may define several resolvers (in a chain for instance), resolvers names need to be chosen carefully to avoid name conflicts (a resolver must have a unique name).

Therefore here is how Ivy deals with the names of the resolvers defined in a macro:

• if there is no name attribute on a resolver in the macrodef, then Ivy will use the name given when using the macro. This is what usually should be done for the main resolver defined in the macro
• if there is a name attribute on a resolver in the macrodef, but this name doesn't contain a @{name} inside, then Ivy will use the provided name prefixed with the name of the macro separated by a dash
• if there is a name attribute on a resolver in the macrodef, and this name contains @{name} somewhere, then Ivy will use this name, and replace @{name} with the name provided when using the macro.

Example:

<ivysettings>
  <macrodef name="mymacro">
    <chain>
      <ibiblio name="ex1" />
      <ibiblio name="ex2.@{name}" m2compatible="true" />
    </chain>
  </macrodef>
	
  <resolvers>
    <mymacro name="default" />
    <mymacro name="other" />
   </resolvers>
</ivysettings>

This is equivalent to:

<ivysettings>
  <resolvers>
    <chain name="default">
      <ibiblio name="default-ex1" />
      <ibiblio name="ex2.default" m2compatible="true" />
    </chain>
    <chain name="other">
      <ibiblio name="other-ex1" />
      <ibiblio name="ex2.other" m2compatible="true" />
    </chain>
   </resolvers>
</ivysettings>

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
name	name of the resover type created	Yes

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
attribute	defines an attribute for the macro resolver	0..n
any resolver	defines the base resolver upon which this macro is defined	1

Examples

Defining a simple macro:

  <macrodef name="mymacro">
    <attribute name="mymainrep"/>
      <filesystem name="fs1">
        <ivy pattern="@{mymainrep}/[organisation]/[module]/[type]s/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]"/>
        <artifact pattern="@{mymainrep}/[organisation]/[module]/[type]s/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]"/>
      </filesystem>
  </macrodef>

Using it:

  <resolvers>
    <mymacro name="default" mymainrep="path/to/myrep"/>
  </resolvers>

---

A complete example:

<ivysettings>
  <macrodef name="mymacro">
    <attribute name="mymainrep"/>
    <attribute name="mysecondrep"/>
    <attribute name="myseconddirlayout" default="[organisation]/[module]/[type]s"/>
    <chain>
      <filesystem name="fs1">
        <ivy pattern="@{mymainrep}/[organisation]/[module]/[type]s/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]"/>
        <artifact pattern="@{mymainrep}/[organisation]/[module]/[type]s/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]"/>
      </filesystem>
      <filesystem name="fs2" latest="latest-time">
        <ivy pattern="@{mysecondrep}/@{myseconddirlayout}/ivy-[revision].xml"/>
        <artifact pattern="@{mysecondrep}/@{myseconddirlayout}/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]"/>
      </filesystem>
    </chain>
  </macrodef>
	
  <resolvers>
    <mymacro name="default" mymainrep="path/to/myrep" mysecondrep="path/to/secondrep"/>
    <mymacro name="other" 
       mymainrep="path/to/myrep" 
       mysecondrep="path/to/secondrep" 
       myseconddirlayout="[module]/[type]s"/>
   </resolvers>
</ivysettings>

---

Tag: attribute

Defines a macrodef attribute. See macrodef for details.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
name	the name of the attribute	Yes
default	the default value of the attribute if none is specified	No, by default attribute are required

---

Tag: resolvers

Defines a list of dependency resolvers usable in ivy. Each dependency resolver is identified by its name, given as an attribute.

The child tag used for the dependency resolver must be equal to a name of a dependency resolver type (either built-in or added with the typedef tag).

since 1.3 Once defined, resolvers can be referenced by their name, using the following syntax:

<resolver ref="alreadydefinedresolver"/>

Note that this works only if the resolver has been already defined, and not if it is defined later in the ivysettings file.

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
any resolver	adds a resolver to the list of available resolvers	1..n

Built-in Resolvers

Ivy comes with a set of built-in dependency resolvers able to answer to the most common needs.

If you don't find the one you want here, you can also check if some one has not contributed it in the links page, or even write your own.

There are basically two types of resolver in Ivy: composite and standard resolvers. A composite resolver is a resolver which delegates the work to other resolvers. The other resolvers are standard resolvers.

Here is the list of built-in resolvers:

Name	Type	Description
IvyRep	Standard	Finds ivy files on ivyrep and artifacts on ibiblio.
IBiblio	Standard	Finds artifacts on ibiblio.
Packager	Standard	Finds ivy files and packaging instructions via URLs, then creates artifacts by following the instructions.
FileSystem	Standard	This very performant resolver finds ivy files and artifacts in your file system.
Url	Standard	Finds ivy files and artifacts in any repository accessible with urls.
Vfs	Standard	Finds ivy files and artifacts in any repository accessible with apache commons vfs.
ssh	Standard	Finds ivy files and artifacts in any repository accessible with ssh.
sftp	Standard	Finds ivy files and artifacts in any repository accessible with sftp.
Chain	Composite	Delegates the finding to a chain of sub resolvers.
Dual	Composite	Delegates the finding of ivy files to one resolver and of artifacts to another.

Common features and attributes

All resolvers of the same type share some common features and attributes detailed here.

Features

validation

All standard resolvers support several options for validation.

The validate attribute is used to configure if Ivy files should be checked against the Ivy file xml schema.

The checkconsistency attribute allow to enable or disable consistency checking between what is expected by Ivy when it finds a module descriptor, and what the module descriptor actually contains.

The descriptor attribute let one define if module descriptors are mandatory or optional.

The checksums attribute is used to define the list of checksums files to use to check the content of downloaded files has not been corrupted (eg during transfer).

force

Any standard resolver can be used in force mode, which is used mainly to handle local development builds. In force mode, the resolver attempts to find a dependency whatever the requested revision is (internally it replace the requested revision by 'latest.integration'), and if it finds one, it forces this revision to be returned, even when used in a chain with returnFirst=false.

By using such a resolver at the beginning of a chain, you can be sure that Ivy will pick up whatever module is available in this resolver (usually a private local build) instead of the real requested revision. This allows to handle use case like a developer working on modules A and C, where A -> B -> C, and pick up the local build for C without having to publish a local version of B.
since 2.0

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required	Composite	Standard
name	the name which identify the resolver	Yes	Yes	Yes
validate	indicates if resolved ivy files should be validated against ivy xsd	No, defaults to call setting	Yes	Yes
force	Indicates if this resolver should be used in force mode (see above). since 2.0	No, defaults to false	No	Yes
checkmodified	Indicates if this resolver should check lastmodified date to know if an ivy file is up to date.	No, defaults to ${ivy.resolver.default.check.modified}	No	Yes
changingPattern	Indicates for which revision pattern this resolver should check lastmodified date to know if an artifact file is up to date. since 1.4. See cache and change management for details.	No, defaults to none	Yes	Yes
changingMatcher	The name of the pattern matcher to use to match a revision against the configured changingPattern. since 1.4. See cache and change management for details.	No, defaults to exactOrRegexp	Yes	Yes
alwaysCheckExactRevision	Indicates if this resolver should check the given revision even if it's a special one (like latest.integration). since 1.3	No, defaults to ${ivy.default.always.check.exact.revision}	No	Yes
namespace	The name of the namespace to which this resolver belong since 1.3	No, defaults to 'system'	Yes	Yes
checkconsistency	true to check consistency of module descriptors found by this resolver, false to avoid consistency check since 1.3	No, defaults to true	No	Yes
descriptor	'optional' if a module descriptor (usually an ivy file) is optional for this resolver, 'required' to refuse modules without module descriptor since 2.0	No, defaults to 'optional'	No (except dual)	Yes
allownomd	DEPRECATED. Use descriptor="required | optional" instead. true if the absence of module descriptor (usually an ivy file) is authorised for this resolver, false to refuse modules without module descriptor since 1.4	No, defaults to true	No (except dual)	Yes
checksums	a comma separated list of checksum algorithms to use both for publication and checking since 1.4	No, defaults to ${ivy.checksums}	No	Yes
latest	The name of the latest strategy to use.	No, defaults to 'default'	Yes	Yes
cache	The name of the cache manager to use.	No, defaults to the value of the default attribute of caches	No	Yes

Examples

<resolvers>
  <filesystem name="1" cache="cache-1">
    <ivy pattern="${ivy.settings.dir}/1/[organisation]/[module]/ivys/ivy-[revision].xml"/>
    <artifact pattern="${ivy.settings.dir}/1/[organisation]/[module]/[type]s/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]"/>
  </filesystem>
  <chain name="chain1">
    <resolver ref="1"/>
    <ivyrep name="ivyrep"/>
  </chain>
  <chain name="chain2" returnFirst="true" dual="true">
    <resolver ref="1"/>
    <ibiblio name="ibiblio"/>
  </chain>
</resolvers>

Defines a filesystem resolver, named '1', which is then used in two chains, the first which seconds the filesystem resolver with an ivyrep resolver, and second which seconds the filesystem resolver with an ibiblio resolver, and which returns the first module found, and uses the whole chain to download artifacts (see corresponding resolvers documentation for details about them). Resolver 1 will use a cache named 'cache-1' which should have been defined under the caches element.

---

Tag	ivyrep
Handle latest	yes, at least if the repository server is apache based
Handle publish	no

This resolver usually uses an URL based repository usually similar in structure to ivyrep to find ivy files, and ibiblio to find artifacts. It can also be configured to use other similar repositories.

Attributes

This resolver shares the common attributes of standard resolvers.

Attribute	Description	Required
ivyroot	the root of the ivy repository.	Yes, but may be provided through ${ivy.ivyrep.default.ivy.root} since 2.0
ivypattern	a pattern describing the layout of the ivy repository.	No, defaults to ${ivy.ivyrep.default.ivy.pattern}
artroot	the root of the artifacts repository.	No, defaults to ${ivy.ivyrep.default.artifact.root}
artpattern	a pattern describing the layout of the artifacts repository.	No, defaults to ${ivy.ivyrep.default.artifact pattern}

Examples

<ivyrep name="ivyrep" ivyroot="http://ivyrep.mycompany.com"/>

Looks for ivy files on and ivyrep like web site located at http://ivyrep.mycompany.com.

---

Tag	ibiblio
Handle latest	yes, at least if the repository server is apache based
Handle publish	no

This resolver usually uses ibiblio to find artifacts. since 1.3 Using the m2compatible attribute, you can benefit from maven 2 repository compatibility (convert dots in organisation in slashes, search for poms, use transitive dependencies of poms). This setting also affects the default place where the resolver look for its artifacts to point to the maven2 repository. So setting this attribute to true is sufficient to use maven 2 ibiblio repository.

since 1.4 When using the m2compatible flag, you can disable the use of poms by setting the usepoms flag to false. It is then roughly equivalent to an url resolver configured like this:

<url name="test" m2compatible="true">
  <artifact pattern="http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/[organisation]/[module]/[revision]/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]"/>
</url>

since 2.0 When used in m2compatible mode with the default pattern, this resolver uses maven-metadata.xml files if present to list the revisions available on the repository. This is especially useful when using a maven specific proxy, which does not serve directory listing. This can be disable by using the useMavenMetadata flag.

Limitation: in m2compatible mode, this resolver is not able list available organizations. It means some features like repreport are not available.

Attributes

This resolver shares the common attributes of standard resolvers.

Attribute	Description	Required
root	the root of the artifacts repository.	No, defaults to ${ivy.ibiblio.default.artifact.root}
pattern	a pattern describing the layout of the artifacts repository.	No, defaults to ${ivy.ibiblio.default.artifact.pattern}
m2compatible	True if this resolver should be maven2 compatible, false otherwise since 1.3	No, defaults to false
usepoms	True if this resolver should use maven poms when it is already in m2compatible mode, false otherwise since 1.4	No, defaults to true
useMavenMetadata	True if this resolver should use maven-metadata.xml files to list available revisions, false to use directory listing since 2.0	No, defaults to true

Examples

<ibiblio name="maven2" m2compatible="true"/>

Defines a resolver called "maven2" using the maven 2 public repository to find module metadata (using maven 2 poms) and artifacts.

---

<ibiblio name="maven" m2compatible="true" usepoms="false"/>

Same as above, but don't use poms, only artifacts.

---

Tag	packager
Handle latest	yes with http urls (and apache server) and with file urls, no with other urls
Handle publish	no

Since 2.0.

This resolver accesses ivy files and "packaging instructions" from an online "packager" repository. "Packager" repositories contain no actual artifacts. To get the artifacts, the packaging instructions are downloaded from the repository and executed locally. These instructions specify additional resource(s) to download and how to create the artifacts from them, for example, by downloading a project's original distribution archive directly from their web site and extracting the desired artifacts.

Packager repositories allow the creation of Ivy repositories that require neither the participation of any of the modules' creators nor setting up a huge mirror site. One such repository on the web is Ivy RoundUp. Of course, private packager repositories are feasible as well.

The Packager resolver supports a "resource cache", where downloaded archives can be stored to avoid duplicate downloads. This cache is entirely separate from the normal Ivy cache: it is "private" to the Packager resolver, and it stores unmodified original software archives, not Ivy artifacts. See the resourceCache attribute below for details.

The packaging instructions are contained in "packager.xml" in a simple XML format. At resolve time this file gets converted into a "build.xml" file via XSLT and then executed using ant. Therefore, ant must be available as an executable on the platform. The ant task executes in a separate ant project and so is not affected by properties, etc. that may be set in any existing ant environment in which Ivy is running. However, Ivy will define a few properties for convenience; see the "Properties" listed below.

For security reasons, the XSLT transform ensures that (a) all downloaded archives have verified SHA1 checksums (including cached resources); and (b) only a very limited set of ant tasks can be performed during the artifact "build" phase; currently these include move, copy, mkdir, zip, unzip, tar, and untar (this restriction may be overridden however; see below).

The Packager resolver is based on the URL resolver and is configured similarly, except the artifact child tags specify where to find the packager.xml files, rather than the artifacts themselves.

Because the packaging process is relatively slow, it is important to use Ivy's caching support to avoid repeated execution of the packaging instructions.

Attributes

This resolver shares the common attributes of standard resolvers, plus the following:

Attribute	Description	Required
buildRoot	Defines the root of the temporary build directory hierarchy	Yes
resourceCache	Directory where downloaded resources should be cached	No; defaults to none
resourceURL	Ivy pattern that specifies a base URL to use for downloading all resources; overrides the URLs in the packaging instructions	No; defaults to none
restricted	True if this resolver should only allow "safe" ant tasks in the packaging instructions. Warning: setting restricted to false creates a security problem due to ant tasks like delete, exec, etc. Do not use this setting when your configuration points to an untrusted repository.	No; defaults to true
verbose	True to run ant with the -verbose flag	No; defaults to false
quiet	True to run ant with the -quiet flag	No; defaults to false
validate	True if this resolver should validate (via XSD) the downloaded XML packaging instructions	No; defaults to true
preserveBuildDirectories	True if this resolver should not delete the temporary build directories in which the ant tasks are executed (for debugging purposes)	No; defaults to false

Setting a resourceURL will cause the resolver to override the URLs for resources specified by the packaging instructions. Instead, all resources will be downloaded from an URL constructed by first resolving the resourceURL pattern into a base URL, and then resolving the resource filename relative to that base URL. In other words, the resourceURL pattern specifies the URL "directory", so it should always end in a forward slash.

If a resourceURL download fails, the resolver will fall back to the original URL from the packaging instructions.

Configure a resourceURL in situations where you don't want to rely on (or wait for) the web sites configured in the packaging instructions, and have access to a better (perhaps private) mirror site.

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
ivy	Defines a pattern for ivy.xml files, using the pattern attribute	1..n
artifact	Defines a pattern for packager.xml files, using the pattern attribute	1..n

Examples

<packager name="ivyroundup"
         buildRoot="${user.home}/.ivy2/packager/build"
         resourceCache="${user.home}/.ivy2/packager/cache"
         resourceURL="ftp://mirror.example.com/pub/resources/[organisation]/[module]/">
    <ivy pattern="http://ivyroundup.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/repo/modules/[organisation]/[module]/[revision]/ivy.xml"/>
    <artifact pattern="http://ivyroundup.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/repo/modules/[organisation]/[module]/[revision]/packager.xml"/>
</packager>

Defines a packager resolver which points to the Ivy RoundUp online repository. Builds will occur in a subdirectory of

${user.home}/.ivy2/packager/build

downloaded resources will be cached in

${user.home}/.ivy2/packager/cache

and the mirror site

ftp://mirror.example.com/pub/resources/[organisation]/[module]/ 

will be tried first for all resources.

Packaging Instructions

The goal of the packaging instructions is to download the required archives, extract the artifacts, and put the artifacts into a subdirectory. Each artifact should be written to artifacts/[type]s/[artifact].[ext] when the ant build completes.

Below is an example of packaging instructions for TestNG 2.5:

<packager-module version="1.0">

    <property name="name" value="${ivy.packager.module}"/>
    <property name="version" value="${ivy.packager.revision}"/>
    <property name="zipname" value="${name}-${version}"/>

    <resource dest="archive" url="http://testng.org/${zipname}.zip" sha1="2ea19275dc17453306f8bb780fe6ef6e9af7756b">
        <url href="http://mirror.example.com/archives/${zipname}.zip"/>
        <include name="${zipname}/src/main/**/*"/>
        <include name="${zipname}/src/jdk15/**/*"/>
        <include name="${zipname}/javadocs/**/*"/>
        <include name="${zipname}/*.jar"/>
    </resource>

    <build>

        <!-- jar  -->
        <move file="archive/${zipname}/${zipname}-jdk14.jar" tofile="artifacts/jars/${name}-jdk14.jar"/>
        <move file="archive/${zipname}/${zipname}-jdk15.jar" tofile="artifacts/jars/${name}-jdk15.jar"/>

        <!-- source -->
        <zip destfile="artifacts/sources/${name}.zip">
            <fileset dir="archive/${zipname}/src/main">
                <include name="**/*.java"/>
            </fileset>
            <fileset dir="archive/${zipname}/src/jdk15">
                <include name="**/*.java"/>
            </fileset>
        </zip>

        <!-- javadoc -->
        <zip destfile="artifacts/javadocs/javadoc.zip">
            <fileset dir="archive/${zipname}/javadocs"/>
        </zip>
    </build>
</packager-module>

Of course, packaging instructions must produce artifacts consistent with those listed in the associated ivy.xml file.

Build-time properties

This resolver ensures following ant properties are defined when it executes the ant build task.

Property	Description
ivy.packager.organisation	Organization of the ivy module whose artifacts are being built
ivy.packager.module	Module of the ivy module whose artifacts are being built
ivy.packager.revision	Revision of the ivy module whose artifacts are being built
ivy.packager.branch	Branch of the ivy module whose artifacts are being built
ivy.packager.resourceCache	The configured resourceCache if any; otherwise not defined
ivy.packager.resourceURL	The resolved resourceURL pattern if any; otherwise not defined

Packager XML Elements

The packager.xml document element can contain the following child tags.

Element	Description	Cardinality
property	Set an ant property	0..n
resource	Define a resource to download and (optionally) unpack	0..n
m2resource	Define a Maven2 resource to download and (optionally) unpack	0..n
build	Specify ant tasks that ultimately result in each artifact being placed into artifacts/[type]s/[artifact].[ext]	0..1

Which ant tasks are allowed within the build tag is controlled by the restricted configuration attribute. When true (the default), only the following ant tasks are allowed: copy, jar, mkdir, move, tar, unjar, untar, unwar, unzip, war, and zip. When false, all ant tasks are allowed.

Warning: setting restricted to false creates a security problem due to ant tasks like delete, exec, etc. Do not use this setting when your configuration points to an untrusted repository.

Resource XML Elements

The resource XML tag supports the following attributes:

Attribute	Description	Required
url	Primary URL for the resource	Yes
sha1	SHA1 checksum of the resource	Yes
dest	Defines the name of the subdirectory into which the artifact should be unpacked	No; defaults to "archive"
tofile	Where to put the file directly; if present no extraction will be performed	No; if present, "dest" is ignored
filename	Name of the file to download	No; if not present, same as the last component of the URL
type	Type of archive: "zip", "jar", "war", "tar", "tgz", "tar.gz", "tar.bz2"	No; if not present, will be automatically determined from the filename suffix

The resource XML tag may contain child elements. An url tag with an href attribute specifies an alternate URL for the resource (see TestNG example above). Any other tags will be included as children of an automatically generated fileset tag.

Maven2 Resources

Special support is included for maven2 resources. For these resources, use the m2resource tag instead of the resource tag. Each m2resource tag specifies one or more artifacts that are downloaded from the Maven2 repository.

M2Resource XML Elements

The m2resource XML tag supports the following attributes:

Attribute	Description	Required
groupId	Maven group ID	No; defaults to ${ivy.packager.organisation}
artifactId	Maven artifact ID	No; defaults to ${ivy.packager.module}
version	Maven version	No; defaults to ${ivy.packager.revision}
repo	Maven repository URL	No; defaults to http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/

Each m2resource XML tag must have one or more artifact tags that define the artifacts to directly download. The URL for each artifact is constructed automatically based on the attributes in the m2resource and artifact tags.

M2Resource Artifact Attributes

The artifact children of m2resource tags support the following attributes:

Attribute	Description	Required
ext	Maven filename extension	No; defaults to "jar"
classifier	Maven classifier (e.g., "sources", "javadoc")	No; defaults to none
sha1	SHA1 checksum of the resource	Yes
dest	Defines the name of the subdirectory into which the artifact should be unpacked	Exactly one of "dest" or "tofile" must be supplied
tofile	Where to put the file; no extraction will be performed
type	Type of archive: "zip", "jar", "war", "tar", "tgz", "tar.gz", "tar.bz2"	No; if not present, will be automatically determined from the filename suffix

Below is an example of packaging instructions for the Apache Commons Email module. Note that no build tag is required because all of the maven2 artifacts are usable directly (i.e., without unpacking anything).

<packager-module version="1.0">
    <m2resource>
        <artifact tofile="artifacts/jars/${ivy.packager.module}.jar" sha1="a05c4de7bf2e0579ac0f21e16f3737ec6fa0ff98"/>
        <artifact classifier="javadoc" tofile="artifacts/javadocs/javadoc.zip" sha1="8f09630f1600bcd0472a36fb2fa2d2a6f2836535"/>
        <artifact classifier="sources" tofile="artifacts/sources/source.zip" sha1="15d67ca689a792ed8f29d0d21e2d0116fa117b7e"/>
    </m2resource>
</packager-module>

---

Tag	filesystem
Handle latest	yes
Handle publish	yes

This resolver uses the file system to resolve ivy files and artifacts. It presents the advantage to usually have very good performances. Moreover, it is easy to setup using basic OS file sharing mechanism.

The configuration of such a resolver is mainly done through ivy and artifact patterns, indicating where ivy files and artifacts can be found in the file system. These patterns must be absolute paths (since 2.0). You can indicate a list of pattern which will be checked one after the other.

since 1.3 Using the m2compatible attribute, this resolver will convert dots found in organisation in slashes like maven2 does for groupId. For instance, it will transform the organisation from 'com.company' into 'com/company' when replacing the token [organisation] in your pattern.
Limitation: in m2compatible mode, this resolver is not able list available organizations. It means some features like repreport are not available.

Atomic publish support

since 2.0 This resolver supports atomic publish, which is very suitable for environments with a lot of concurrent publish and resolve. The atomic publish relies on the atomicity of the rename operation in the underlying filesystem (which includes NTFS and POSIX based filesystems).
In this case the resolver starts by publishing the module according to the pattern, but where a '.part' suffix is appended to the revision. Then the publish is committed with a rename to the final location.

Limitations
Atomic publish is currently limited in several ways:

• you need to use a pattern for both the artifact and the ivy files which uses the revision as a directory. For instance "${repository.dir}/[module]/[revision]/[artifact].[ext]" works, "${repository.dir}/[module]/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]" doesn't
• both the artifact and ivy pattern should have the same prefix until the [revision] token.
• overwrite during publish is not supported
• you should not use revision names ending with '.part'

The transactional attribute can be used to configure the atomicity behavior:

• auto
use transaction if possible (according to limitation), otherwise don't
• true
always use transaction, fail the build if a limitation is not fulfilled
• false
don't use transaction at all

Attributes

This resolver shares the common attributes of standard resolvers.

Attribute	Description	Required
m2compatible	True if this resolver should be maven2 compatible, false otherwise since 1.3	No, defaults to false
local	True if this resolver should be considered local, false otherwise since 1.4. See useOrigin attribute on the caches element for details.	No, defaults to true
transactional	true to force the use of transaction, false to prevent the use of transaction, auto to get transaction when possible since 2.0. See above for details.	No, defaults to auto

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
ivy	defines a pattern for ivy files, using the pattern attribute	0..n
artifact	defines a pattern for artifacts, using the pattern attribute	1..n

---

Tag	url
Handle latest	yes with http urls (and apache server) and with file urls, no with other urls
Handle publish	yes with http urls whose destination supports publishing (as of Ivy 2.0)

This resolver is one of the most generic, in fact most of the previous resolvers can be obtained by a particular configuration of this one. Indeed it uses urls to find ivy files and artifacts. The urls it uses are defined through ivy and artifact children, each giving a pattern to find ivy files or artifacts.

Limitation: in m2compatible mode, this resolver is not able list available organizations. It means some features like repreport are not available.

Attributes

This resolver shares the common attributes of standard resolvers.

Attribute	Description	Required
m2compatible	True if this resolver should be maven2 compatible, false otherwise since 1.3	No, defaults to false

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
ivy	defines a pattern for ivy files, using the pattern attribute	0..n
artifact	defines a pattern for artifacts, using the pattern attribute	1..n

Example

<url name="two-patterns-example">
  <ivy pattern="http://ivyrep.mycompany.com/[module]/[revision]/ivy-[revision].xml" />
  <artifact pattern="http://ivyrep.mycompany.com/[module]/[revision]/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]" />
  <artifact pattern="http://ivyrep.mycompany.com/[module]/[revision]/[artifact].[ext]" />
</url>

Looks for ivy files in one place and for artifacts in two places: with or without revision in name (revision being already in the directory structure).

---

Tag	chain
Handle latest	depends on sub resolvers
Handle publish	delegates to first sub resolver in chain

This resolver is only a container of a chain of other resolvers. The sub resolvers can be any resolver, including a chain. An attribute enable to indicate if the chain must be iterated after the first found or not (at least when asking for a latest revision). If the chain is iterated, then it's the latest among the ones found that is returned. If the chain is not iterated, then it's the first found which is returned.

Attributes

This resolver shares the common attributes of composite resolvers.

Attribute	Description	Required
returnFirst	true if the first found should be returned.	No, defaults to false
dual	true if the chain should behave like a dual chain. since 1.3	No, defaults to false

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
any resolver	a sub resolver to use	1..n

Examples

<chain name="test">
  <filesystem name="1">
    <ivy pattern="${ivy.settings.dir}/1/[organisation]/[module]/ivys/ivy-[revision].xml"/>
    <artifact pattern="${ivy.settings.dir}/1/[organisation]/[module]/[type]s/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]"/>
  </filesystem>
  <ivyrep name="2"/>
</chain>

Both a filesystem and ivyrep will be used to look for ivy files. If a dynamic revision is required, then both the filesystem and ivyrep will be queried to find the most recent revision among the two resolvers. Once the most recent revision is found in one resolver, it's the same resolver which will be used to download artifacts.

---

<chain name="test" returnFirst="true">
  <filesystem name="1">
    <ivy pattern="${ivy.settings.dir}/1/[organisation]/[module]/ivys/ivy-[revision].xml"/>
    <artifact pattern="${ivy.settings.dir}/1/[organisation]/[module]/[type]s/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]"/>
  </filesystem>
  <ivyrep name="2"/>
</chain>

Same as before, except that if a revision is found in the filesystem then ivyrep will not be queried: its the filesystem which will be used for both the ivy file and the artifacts.

---

<chain name="test" dual="true">
  <filesystem name="1">
    <ivy pattern="${ivy.settings.dir}/1/[organisation]/[module]/ivys/ivy-[revision].xml"/>
    <artifact pattern="${ivy.settings.dir}/1/[organisation]/[module]/[type]s/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]"/>
  </filesystem>
  <ivyrep name="2"/>
</chain>

Same as first example, except that once a module is found by either filesystem or ivyrep, then it's the whole chain which will be queried to download the artifacts. So in this case ivy file and artifacts may be split across the two resolvers for the same module.

---

Tag	dual
Handle latest	depends on sub resolvers
Handle publish	delegates to ivy sub resolver if artifact to publish is of "ivy" type, to artifact sub resolver otherwise

This resolver delegates its job to one resolver for ivy files and another for artifacts.

Attributes

This resolver shares the common attributes of composite resolvers.

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
any resolver	two resolvers, the first being the ivy resolver, the second the artifact resolver	2

---

Tag	sftp
Handle latest	yes
Handle publish	yes

This resolver can be used when your ivy repository is located on a server accessible via sftp. The secured nature of sftp and its wide spread implementation on most *nix servers makes this resolver a very good candidate in an enterprise environment. since 1.4 If your server supports ssh but not sftp, there is also an ssh resolver.

Note that sftp is also supported by vfs, so you can use a vfs resolver instead. The advantage of this resolver is that you have a better control over authentication, it can prompt for username/password credentials, or you can use private/public key authentication, which is not possible with the vfs resolver. When it prompts for username/password, it uses a Swing dialog, which is not possible in a headless environment. If you want to prompt for the credentials on the command line, use ant input task for example before calling ivy.

All necessary connection parameters can be set here via attributes.
However all attributes defined in the pattern url of the resolver will have higher priority and will overwrite the values given here. To specify connection parameters in the pattern, you have to specify a full url and not just a path as pattern.
e.g. pattern="/path/to/my/repos/[artifact].[ext]" will use all connection parameters from this class
e.g. pattern="sftp://myserver.com/path/to/my/repos/[artifact].[ext]" will use all parameters from the attributes with the exception of the host, which will be "myserver.com"
e.g. pattern="sftp://user:geheim@myserver.com:8022/path/to/my/repos/[artifact].[ext]" will use only the keyFile and keyFilePassword from the attributes (if needed). Rest will come from the url.


Note that the authentication features of this resolver are exactly the same as the ssh resolver. Choosing between the two is often a matter of server implementation. If your server supports sftp, usually it's preferrable.

Internally this resolver relies on jsch as ssh client, which is a popular java ssh client, used for example in eclipse.

Attributes

This resolver shares the common attributes of standard resolvers.

Attribute	Description	Required
user	The username to provide as credential	No, defaults to username given on the patterns, or prompt if none is set
userPassword	The password to provide as credential	No, defaults to password given on the patterns, or prompt if none is set
keyFile	Path to the keyfile to use for authentication	No, defaults to username/password authentication
keyFilePassword	the password used to protect the key file	No, will prompt for password if keyFile authentication is used and if it is password encrypted
host	The host to connect to	No, defaults to host given on the patterns, fail if none is set
port	The port to connect to	No, defaults to 22

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
ivy	defines a pattern for ivy files, using the pattern attribute	0..n
artifact	defines a pattern for artifacts, using the pattern attribute	1..n

Example

<sftp user="myuser" host="myhost.com">
  <ivy pattern="/path/to/ivy/[module]/ivy.xml"/>
  <artifact pattern="/path/to/[organisation]/[module]/[artifact].[ext]"/>
</sftp> 

Will connect to myhost.com using myuser and prompt for the password.

---

<sftp user="${myuser}" userPassword="${my.password}" host="myhost.com">
  <ivy pattern="path/to/ivy/[module]/ivy.xml"/>
  <artifact pattern="path/to/[organisation]/[module]/[artifact].[ext]"/>
</sftp>

Will connect to myhost.com using user and password provided with ivy variables.

---

<sftp>
  <ivy pattern="sftp://user:geheim@yourserver.com:8022/path/to/repos/[module]/[revision]/ivy.xml"/>
  <artifact pattern="sftp://user:secret@myserver.com:8022/path/to/my/repos/[artifact].[ext]"/>
</sftp>

Will connect to yourserver.com on port 8022 with user 'user' and password 'geheim' for authentication for ivy files, and to myserver.com on port 8022 using user 'user' and password 'secret' for the artifacts.

---

<sftp keyFile="path/to/key/file" keyFilePassword="${password}">
  <ivy pattern="sftp://user@yourserver.com:8022/path/to/repos/[module]/[revision]/ivy.xml"/>
  <artifact pattern="sftp://user@myserver.com:8022/path/to/my/repos/[artifact].[ext]"/>
</sftp>

Will connect to yourserver.com on port 8022 with user 'user' and use keyFile path/to/key/file for keyFile and the value of password variable for keyFilePassword authentication for ivy files, and to myserver.com on port 8022 using user 'user' with the same keyFile/keyFilePassword pair for the artifacts.

---

Tag	ssh
Handle latest	yes
Handle publish	yes

This resolver can be used when your ivy repository is located on a server accessible via ssh. The secured nature of ssh and its wide spread implementation on most *nix servers makes this resolver a very good candidate in an enterprise environment. since 1.4 If your server supports sftp, you can consider using the sftp resolver.

Internally this resolver shares most of its behaviour with the sftp resolver, so refer to its documentation for details.

Attributes

This resolver shares the common attributes of standard resolvers.

Attribute	Description	Required
user	The username to provide as credential	No, defaults to username given on the patterns, or prompt if none is set
userPassword	The password to provide as credential	No, defaults to password given on the patterns, or prompt if none is set
keyFile	Path to the keyfile to use for authentication	No, defaults to username/password authentication
keyFilePassword	the password used to protect the key file	No, will prompt for password if keyFile authentication is used and if it is password encrypted
host	The host to connect to	No, defaults to host given on the patterns, fail if none is set
port	The port to connect to	No, defaults to 22
publishPermissions	A four digit string (e.g., 0644, see "man chmod", "man open") specifying the permissions of the published files. (since 2.0)	No, defaults to scp standard behaviour

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
ivy	defines a pattern for ivy files, using the pattern attribute	0..n
artifact	defines a pattern for artifacts, using the pattern attribute	1..n

Example

<ssh user="myuser" host="myhost.com">
  <ivy pattern="/path/to/ivy/[module]/ivy.xml"/>
  <artifact pattern="/path/to/[organisation]/[module]/[artifact].[ext]"/>
</ssh> 

Will connect to myhost.com using myuser and prompt for the password.

---

<ssh keyFile="path/to/key/file" keyFilePassword="${password}">
  <ivy pattern="ssh://user:geheim@yourserver.com:8022/path/to/repos/[module]/[revision]/ivy.xml"/>
  <artifact pattern="ssh://user:geheim@myserver.com:8022/path/to/my/repos/[artifact].[ext]"/>
</ssh>

Will connect to yourserver.com on port 8022 with user geheim and use keyFile path/to/key/file for keyFile and the value of password variable for keyFilePassword authentication for ivy files, and to myserver.com on port 8022 using user geheim with the same keyFile/keyFilePassword pair for the artifacts.

---

Tag	vfs
Handle latest	depend on vfs capacity, usually yes
Handle publish	depend on vfs capacity, usually yes

This resolver is certainly the most capable, since it relies on Apache commons VFS, which gives an uniform access to a good number of file systems, including ftp, webdav, zip, ... since 1.4 Note: commons vfs has not released a stable version yet, hence Ivy relies on a nightly build. Stability should thus be considered carefully before using this resolver in a production environment

Attributes

This resolver shares the common attributes of standard resolvers.

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
ivy	defines a pattern for ivy files, using the pattern attribute	0..n
artifact	defines a pattern for artifacts, using the pattern attribute	1..n

Example

<vfs name="vfs-resolver">
  <ivy pattern="sftp://username:password@host/[organisation]/[module]/[revision]/ivy.xml" />
  <artifact pattern="sftp://username:password@host/[organisation]/[module]/[revision]/[artifact].[ext]" />
</vfs> 

Access ivy and artifacts files using sftp.

---

Tag: conflict-managers

Defines a list of conflicts managers usable in ivy. Each conflict manager is identified by its name, given as an attribute.
The child tag used for the conflict manager must be equal to a name of a conflict manager type (either built-in
or added with the typedef tag).

Here is a list of predefined conflicts managers (which do not require anything in the configuration file):

• all
this conflicts manager resolve conflicts by selecting all revisions. Also called NoConflictManager, it does evict any module.
• latest-time
this conflict manager selects only the 'latest' revision, latest being defined as the latest in time. Note that latest in time is costly to compute, so prefer latest-revision if you can.
• latest-revision
this conflict manager selects only the 'latest' revision, latest being defined by a string comparison of revisions.
• latest-compatible
this conflict manager selects the latest version in the conflicts which can result in a compatible set of dependencies. This means that in the end this conflict manager does not allow any conflict (like the strict conflict manager), except that it follows a best effort strategy to try to find a set of compatible modules (according to the version constraints)
• strict
this conflict manager throws an exception (i.e. causes a build failure) whenever a conflict is found.

The two "latest" conflict managers also take into account the force attribute of the dependencies.
Indeed direct dependencies can declare a force attribute (see dependency), which indicates the the revision given in the direct dependency should be prefered over indirect dependencies.

Here is a list of conflict manager types available, which can be used to define your own custom conflict managers:

• latest-cm
The latest conflict manager uses a latest strategy to select the latest revision among several ones. Both latest-time and latest-revision conflict managers are based on this conflict manager type. It takes 'latest' as attribute to define which latest strategy should be used. Example:

<latest-cm name="mylatest-conflict-manager" latest="my-latest-strategy"/>

• compatible-cm
The latest compatible conflict manager uses a latest strategy to select the latest revision among several ones. It takes 'latest' as attribute to define which latest strategy should be used. Example:

<compatible-cm name="my-latest-compatible-conflict-manager" latest="my-latest-strategy"/>

• regexp-cm
This conflict manager is based on a regular expression and throw an exception (i.e. causes a build failure) when a conflict is found with versions with different matching group. For instance if a conflict is found between 1.2.x and 1.3.y it will throw an exception if the regular exception is (.*)\.\d, because the matching group will match different string (1.2 and 1.3). 1.2.1 and 1.2.2 won't throw an exception with the same regular expression. The regular expression is set using the 'regexp' attribute. A 'ignoreNonMatching' attribute can also be set to simply warrn when a version is found which does not match the regular expression, instead of throwing an exception.

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
any conflict manager	adds a conflict manager to the list of available conflict managers	0..n

---

Tag: modules

Defines per module or module set settings. The rules are given by defining a module set, using pattern for module organisation and name, and giving some settings for the set, like the name of the corresponding resolver to use.

If no rule match a given module, the default setting will be used.

Even if not required, because the use of a default big resolver (chain, for instance) able to resolve all dependencies can answer all the needs, the configuration of smaller resolvers used for different cases can improve performances a lot. For instance, if you have a local repository for your modules and a distant repository for third party libraries, it is a good idea to have two separate resolvers, and configure ivy to use one for all your modules and another for the rest (the default one).

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
module	defines a module set rule	1..n

---

Tag: module

Define a module set rule. The tag defines a module set, by giving an expression and the matcher to use for organisation, name, revision and any extra attribute identifying your modules. The rule matching is performed in order, and is using a pattern matcher. Hence you can use * to specify all, or simply avoid specifying the attribute.

The revision and extra attributes are only used for rules defining the resolver to use. For other settings, use only organisation and module name.

It also gives the specific setting to use for this module set.

For each module set, you can configure:

• the resolver to use
• the conflict manager to use
• the default branch to use
• the resolve mode to use

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
organisation	the organisation to match to apply the rule.	No, defaults to *
name	the module's name to match to apply the rule.	No, defaults to *
revision	the module's revision to match to apply the rule. Note that the version may not be resolved yet (be latest.integration for instance), so be very careful when using this attribute. since 2.0	No, defaults to *
any extra attribute	an extra attribute to match to apply the rule. since 2.0	No, defaults to *
matcher	the matcher to use to match the modules to which the resolver should be applied since 1.3	No, defaults to exactOrRegexp
resolver	the name of the resolver to apply. The resolver must have been defined in the resolvers section of the configuration file.	No
conflict-manager	the name of the conflict manager to apply. since 1.4	No
branch	the default branch to apply. since 1.4	No
resolveMode	the resolve mode to use. since 2.0	No

Examples

<modules>
  <module organisation="apache" name="*" resolver="myprojectsresolver"/>
</modules>

Uses myprojectresolver for all modules from Apache.

---

<modules>
  <module organisation="apache" name="commons-*" matcher="glob" resolver="myapachecommonsresolver"/>
</modules>

Uses myapachecommonsresolver for all modules beginning by commons- from apache.

---

<modules>
  <module organisation="apache" name="commons-[a-z]+" myextra="val.*" matcher="regexp" resolver="myapachecommonsresolver"/>
</modules>

Uses myapachecommonsresolver for all modules from 'apache' beginning by 'commons-' followed by any number of alphabetic lowercase characters, and with the extra attribute 'myextra' having a value starting with 'val'.

---

<modules>
  <module organisation="apache" name="ivy*" matcher="glob" conflict-manager="latest-time"/> 
</modules>

Uses latest-time conflict manager for all modules from apache which name begins with ivy.

---

<modules>
  <module organisation="apache" name="ivy*" matcher="glob" branch="fix-103"/> 
</modules>

Uses 'fix-103' as default branch for all modules from apache which name begins with ivy.

---

Tag: outputters

Defines a list of report outputters usable in ivy. A report outputter is used at the end of the resolve process to generate a report of how the resolve has been performed.

Two report outputters are registered by default:

• a log report outputter (LogReportOutputter)
which produces the output on the console at the end of the resolve, which looks like this:

        ---------------------------------------------------------------------
        |                  |            modules            ||   artifacts   |
        |       conf       | number| search|dwnlded|evicted|| number|dwnlded|
        ---------------------------------------------------------------------
        |      default     |   1   |   1   |   0   |   0   ||   1   |   1   |
        ---------------------------------------------------------------------

• an xml report outputter (XmlReportOutputter)
which produces an xml report in the cache, which is mandatory for correct Ivy behaviour, since it's that report which is used when you do a post resolve step in a separate buid from the resolve itself. It's also this xml report which is processed to generate all the different reports available in the report task.

The child tag used for the parser must be equal to a name of a report outputter type (added with the typedef tag).

To see how to define your own report outputter see Extending Ivy documentation

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
any report outputter	adds a report outputter to the list of available ones	0..n

---

Tag: statuses

Defines the list of available statuses. since 1.4 By default, ivy has 3 statuses: release, milestone and integration. By adding a statuses section to your ivysettings file, you define the statuses you want to use. Note that in this case if you still want to have ivy default statuses you will have to declare them.

The integration property on each status is only used for recursive delivery, an integration dependency being delivered if the caller is not in integration state itself.

The default status is the one used when none is defined in a module descriptor. If not specified, it defaults to the last defined status.

The statuses order is important, the first is considered the more mature, the last the less mature. This is used to know if a status is compatible with a latest.<status> version matcher.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
default	the name of the status to use when none is declared in an ivy file	No, defaults to the last status declared

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
status	defines a new status	0..n

Examples

<statuses default="bronze">
  <status name="gold" integration="false"/>
  <status name="silver" integration="false"/>
  <status name="bronze" integration="true"/>
</statuses> 

Defines 3 statuses, gold, silver and bronze. The default status used when none is declared in an ivy file will be bronze.
It is also considered as an integration status, and thus doesn't trigger any recrusive delivery.

---

Tag: status

Define one available module status. See statuses page for details about how statuses are defined.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
name	name of status defined	Yes
integration	true if this is an integration status, false otherwise	No, defaults to false

---

Tag: triggers
since 1.4 Defines a list of triggers to activate on some Ivy events. A trigger is an action which is performed whenever a particular event occurs.
Ivy supports 3 type of triggers out of the box:

• ant-call
calls a target in the same build as the original one whenever a particular event occurs.
• ant-build
calls an ant build which may be in another ant build script.
• log
echo a message, usually in a file

If you want to use a different trigger, you can implement your own.

The event available in Ivy are the following ones:

Name	Attributes	Description
pre-resolve	organisation the organisation of the module for which the dependencies will be resolved module the name of the module for which the dependencies will be resolved revision the revision of the module for which the dependencies will be resolved conf comma separated list of configurations which will be resolved	Fired at the beginning of the resolve process, before a module dependencies and transitive dependencies are resolved.
pre-resolve-dependency	organisation the organisation of the dependency resolved module the name of the dependency resolved req-revision the requested revision for the dependency since 2.0 (provided for consistency with post-resolve-dependency) req-revision-default the default requested revision constraint for the dependency since 2.0 req-revision-dynamic the requested revision dynamic constraint for the dependency since 2.0 revision the requested revision for the dependency resolver the name of the resolver used to resolve the dependency	Fired before each dependency is resolved. In this case resolved means resolving the actual revision if the requested revision is a version constraint and not a static version, and downloading all necessary metadata information.
post-resolve-dependency	organisation the organisation of the dependency resolved module the name of the dependency resolved req-revision the requested revision for the dependency since 2.0 req-revision-default the default requested revision constraint for the dependency since 2.0 req-revision-dynamic the requested revision dynamic constraint for the dependency since 2.0 revision the revision of the dependency resolved, or the requested revision if the resolution was not successful resolved true if the resolution was successful, false otherwise duration the time elapsed to resolve the dependency (in ms) since 2.0 resolver the name of the resolver used to resolve the dependency any extra attribute all extra attributes found on the info tag of the resolved dependency are available since 2.0	Fired after each dependency is resolved
post-resolve	organisation the organisation of the module for which the dependencies have been resolved module the name of the module for which the dependencies have been resolved revision the revision of the module for which the dependencies have been resolved conf comma separated list of configurations resolved resolve-id the identifier of the resolution process since 2.0 nb-dependencies total number of dependencies, including transitive and evicted ones since 2.0 nb-artifacts total number of artifacts resolved, excluding metadata artifacts since 2.0 resolve-duration the time (in ms) elapsed to resolve dependencies, before dowloading artifacts since 2.0 download-duration the time (in ms) elapsed to download all artifacts, excluding metadata artifacts downloaded during the first phase of the resolution process since 2.0 download-size the total size (in bytes) of all downloaded artifacts, excluding metadata artifacts. Only artifacts actually downloaded (not in cache or used from their original location) are considered since 2.0	Fired at the end of the resolve process, when all module dependencies have been resolved
pre-download-artifact	organisation the organisation of the artifact which is about to be downloaded module the name of the module of the artifact which is about to be downloaded revision the revision of the the artifact which is about to be downloaded artifact the name of the the artifact which is about to be downloaded type the type of the the artifact which is about to be downloaded ext the extension of the the artifact which is about to be downloaded metadata true if the artifact to be downloaded is a metadata artifact, false for published artifacts since 2.0 resolver the name of the resolver used to download the artifact origin the origin location from which it will be downloaded local true if it's a local artifact, false otherwise	Fired before an artifact is downloaded from a repository to the cache
post-download-artifact	organisation the organisation of the artifact which was just downloaded module the name of the module of the artifact which was just downloaded revision the revision of the the artifact which was just downloaded artifact the name of the the artifact which was just downloaded type the type of the the artifact which was just downloaded ext the extension of the the artifact which was just downloaded metadata true if the downloaded artifact is a metadata artifact, false for published artifacts since 2.0 resolver the name of the resolver used to download the artifact origin the origin location from which it was downloaded local true if it's a local artifact, false otherwise size the size in bytes of the downloaded artifact duration the time elapsed to download the artifact (in ms) since 2.0 file the file to which it has been downloaded	Fired after an artifact has been downloaded from a repository to the cache
pre-retrieve since 2.0	organisation the organisation of the module for which the dependencies will be retrieved module the name of the module for which the dependencies will be retrieved revision the revision of the module for which the dependencies will be retrieved conf comma separated list of configurations which will be retrieved symlink true if Ivy will use symbolic links instead of copies on supported platforms, false otherwise sync true if the retrieve process will be performed in sync mode, false otherwise	Fired at the beginning of the retrieve process.
post-retrieve since 2.0	organisation the organisation of the module for which the dependencies have been retrieved module the name of the module for which the dependencies will be retrieved revision the revision of the module for which the dependencies have been retrieved conf comma separated list of configurations which have been retrieved symlink true if Ivy used symbolic links instead of copies on supported platforms, false otherwise sync true if the retrieve process has been performed in sync mode, false otherwise duration the time elapsed in ms during the retrieve process size the total size of artifacts which have actually been copied (or symlinked) nbCopied the number of artifacts copied or symlinked nbUptodate the number of artifacts which were already present and up to date at the destination location	Fired at the end of the retrieve process.
pre-publish-artifact since 2.0	organisation the organisation of the artifact which is about to be published module the name of the module of the artifact which is about to be published revision the revision of the the artifact which is about to be published artifact the name of the the artifact which is about to be published type the type of the the artifact which is about to be published ext the extension of the the artifact which is about to be published resolver the name of the resolver into which the artifact is about to be published file the absolute path of the source file for the artifact overwrite "true" if the new data will overwrite existing artifacts, "false" otherwise	Fired before an artifact is published into a repository
post-publish-artifact since 2.0	organisation the organisation of the artifact that was published module the name of the module of the artifact that was published revision the revision of the the artifact that was published artifact the name of the the artifact that was published type the type of the the artifact that was published ext the extension of the the artifact that was published resolver the name of the resolver into which the artifact was published file the absolute path of the source file for the artifact overwrite "true" if the new data overwrote existing artifacts, "false" otherwise status "successful" if the artifact published successfully; "failed" if the artifact failed to publish, or if the status is unknown	Fired after an artifact is published into a repository. Note that this event is fired whether or not the publication succeeded. The "status" property can be checked to verify success.

The child tag used for the dependency resolver must be equal to a name of a trigger type (either built-in or added with the typedef tag).

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
any trigger	adds a trigger to the list of registered triggers	1..n

Built-in Triggers

Ivy comes with 3 built-in triggers:

Name	Description
ant-build	Triggers an ant build. Note that by default the ant build is triggered only once per build file, the property onlyonce can be set to false to change this.
ant-call	Calls a target in the current ant build.
log	Logs a message on the console or in a log file.

Common attributes

All triggers share some common attributes detailed here.

Among these attributes, you will find how to select when the trigger should be performed. You have to provide an event name, which is simple, but you can also use a filter expression. The syntax for this expression is very simple and limited:
you can use the = operator to compare an attribute (left operande) with a value (right operande).
you can use AND OR NOT as boolean operators
you cannot use parenthesis to change the precedence

Attribute	Description	Required
name	the name of the trigger for identification purpose only	Yes
event	the name of the event on which the trigger should be performed	Yes
filter	a filter expression used to restrict when the trigger should be performed	No, defaults to no filter

Examples

<triggers>
    <ant-build antfile="${ivy.settings.dir}/[module]/build.xml" target="publish"
           event="pre-resolve-dependency" filter="revision=latest.integration"/>
</triggers>

Triggers an ant build of the ant file ${ivy.settings.dir}/[module]/build.xml (where [module] is replaced by the name of the dependency resolved) with the target "publish", just before resolving a dependency with a latest.integration revision.
Note that by default the ant build is triggered only once per build file. See below to see how to trigger the build more than once.

---

<triggers>
    <ant-build antfile="${ivy.settings.dir}/[module]/build.xml" target="publish"
           event="pre-resolve-dependency" filter="revision=latest.integration"
           onlyonce="false" />
</triggers>

Same as before, but this time the builds will be triggered as many time as the dependency is resolved, instead of only once.

---

<triggers>
    <ant-call target="unzip" prefix="dep"
          event="post-download-artifact" filter="type=zip AND status=successful"/>
</triggers>

Triggers an ant call of the target unzip just after downloading a zip artifact, prefixing all parameters to the target with 'dep'.
Here is how the target can look like:

<target name="unzip">
     <echo>
        unzipping artifact: 
        organisation=${dep.organisation} 
        module=${dep.module} 
        revision=${dep.revision}
        artifact=${dep.artifact}
        type=${dep.type}
        ext=${dep.ext}
        origin=${dep.origin}
        local=${dep.local}
        size=${dep.size}
        file=${dep.file}
     </echo>
     <mkdir dir="${basedir}/out"/>
     <unzip src="${dep.file}" dest="${basedir}/out"/>
</target>

---

<triggers>
    <log file="ivy.log" 
          message='downloaded "${origin}" to "${file}" (${duration}ms - ${size}B)'
          event="post-download-artifact" filter="status=successful"/>
</triggers>

Logs any successful artifact download, with information on the source and destination, and details on download size and duration.

The file attribute is optional, the log trigger will output messages to console if it isn't provided.

---

Tag: version-matchers

Defines a list of version matchers. since 1.4 The child tag used for the version matcher must be equal to a name of a report outputter type (added with the typedef tag).

A version matcher is used to evaluate if a a dependency version contraint matches a dependency version.

See dependency doc for details about built-in version matchers.

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
any version matcher	adds a version matcher to the list of available ones	0..n

---

Ivy use is entirely based on module descriptors known as "ivy files". Ivy files are xml files, usually called ivy.xml, containing the description of the dependencies of a module, its published artifacts and its configurations.

Here is the simplest ivy file you can write:

<ivy-module version="2.0">
  <info organisation="myorg"
        module="mymodule"
        />
</ivy-module>

If you want to see a sample module descriptor using almost all possibilities of ivy files, check this one, with or without xslt.

Before beginning the reference itself, it is required to have in mind the terminology defined in the main page of this reference documentation.

For those familiar with xml schema, the schema used to validate ivy files can be found here. For those using xsd aware IDE, you can declare the xsd in your ivy files to benefit from code completion / validation:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<ivy-module version="2.0" 
            xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
            xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation=
                   "http://ant.apache.org/ivy/schemas/ivy.xsd">
  <info organisation="myorg"
        module="mymodule"
        />
</ivy-module>

Dynamic and resolved ivy files

A module descriptor (ivy file) is needed both before and after the publication of each revision of the module. Depending on the case, a module descriptor can be either dynamic or resolved:

Dynamic descriptor for module development

During the module development time, between publications, the descriptor helps in managing all the possibly changing dependencies of the module. For that purpose, development time ivy files can declare dynamic dependencies to allow for a greater flexibility of use. Dynamic revision references like "latest.integration" or "1.0.+" are possible and may resolve to different artifacts at different times. Variables can be used for even more flexibility. Development time ivy files are hence called "dynamic", because they can produce different results over time. The dynamic ivy files are normally considered source files and kept with them (under SCM control).

Resolved descriptors for publishing

At each publication, another kind of a module descriptor is needed to document the dependencies of the particular published revision of the module. For that purpose, the descriptor usually needs to be fixed as its dependencies should no longer change. In doing so, the published module revision gets fixed, explicitly resolved dependencies. No variables are allowed either. Such publication-friendly, static ivy files are called "resolved", because they should always produce the same results. The resolved ivy files are comparable to published artifacts and are kept with them in a repository.

Resolved ivy files are generated from their original dynamic ivy files via the deliver task.

Note that although it is technically possible to publish module revisions with dynamic ivy files, it is not a generally recommended practice.

Hierarchical Index

ivy-module
    info
        license
        ivyauthor
        repository
        description
    configurations
        conf
    publications
        artifact
            conf
    dependencies
        dependency
            conf
                mapped
            artifact
                conf
            include
                conf
            exclude
                conf
    conflicts
        manager

ivy-module

Tag: ivy-module

The root tag of any ivy file (module descriptor).

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
version	the version of the ivy file specification - should be '2.0' with current version of ivy	Yes

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
info	contains information about the described module	1
configurations	container for configuration elements	0..1
publications	container for published artifact elements	0..1
dependencies	container for dependency elements	0..1
conflicts	section to configure the conflict managers to use	0..1

---

Tag: info Parent: ivy-module

Gives identification and basic information about the module this ivy file describes.

since 1.4 This tag supports extra attributes.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
organisation	the name of the organisation that is the owner of this module.	Yes
module	the name of the module described by this ivy file.	Yes
branch	the branch of this module. since 1.4	No, defaults to the default branch setting, or nothing if no default branch is configured
revision	the revision of this module.	Yes in repository ivy files, no in ivy files to resolve
status	the status of this module. See terminology section for details	No, default to 'integration'
publication	the date of publication of this module. It should be given in this format: yyyyMMddHHmmss	No, but it's a good practice to set it with delivered ivy files

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
license	contains information about the licenses of the described module	0..n
ivyauthor	describes who has contributed to write the ivy file	0..n
repository	describes on which public repositories this module can be found	0..n
description	describes how to use the module	0..1

After the description, you can also place your own tags in your onw namespace. This allow to provide some custom information about the module.

---

Tag: license Parent: info

Gives information about a license of the described module.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
name	the name of the license. Try to respect spelling when using a classical license.	Yes
url	an url pointing to the license text.	No, but it's a good practice to indicate it

---

Tag: ivyauthor Parent: info

Gives information about who has contributed to write this ivy file. It does NOT indicate who
is the author of the module itself.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
name	the name of the author, as a person or a company.	Yes
url	an url pointing to where the author can bea reached.	No, but it's a good practice to indicate it

---

Tag: repository Parent: info

Gives information about a public repository where the module can be found. This information
is given as an indication, repositories being able to be down over time.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
name	the name of the repository. Try to respect spelling for common repositories (ibiblio, ivyrep, ...)	Yes
url	an url pointing to the repository.	Yes
pattern	an ivy pattern to find modules on this repository	No, but it's recommended to indicate it.
ivys	true if ivy file can be found on this repository	No, defaults to false.
artifacts	true if module artifacts can be found on this repository	No, defaults to false.

---

Tag: description Parent: info

Describes the current module. This tag is the only one which can contain free text,
including html. It is used to describe the module itself, usually in a single short phrase
(it is not meant to replace the module description on the corresponding web site), and then
gives all information necessary to use the module, especially information about
public configurations, how and when to use them.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
homepage	the url of the homepage of the module	No, but it's recommended to indicate it.

---

Tag: configurations Parent: ivy-module

A container for configuration elements. If this container is not present, it is assumed that the module has one public configuration called 'default'.

since 1.3 You can define a new default conf mapping on this container by specifying the defaultconfmapping attribute.

A default conf mapping is very similar to the defaultconf which can be set on the dependencies tag, but it has a slightly different behaviour.
The default conf mapping not only defines the conf mapping to use when no conf mapping is specified for a dependency in this ivy file, but it also modify the way ivy interprets conf mapping with no mapped conf. In this case, Ivy will look in the default conf mapping and use the conf mapping defined in the default conf mapping for the conf for which there is no mapped conf.

See examples on the dependency page.

since 1.4 You can activate a confmappingoverride mode for all configurations, in which case the extending configurations will override the mappings of the configurations they extend from.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
defaultconfmapping	the default conf mapping to use in this ivy file since 1.3	No, defaults to no default conf mapping
confmappingoverride	true to activate configuration mapping override, false otherwise since 1.4	No, defaults to false

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
conf	declares a configuration of this module	0..n
include	include configurations from another file	0..n

Configuration mappings details

When Ivy parses your Ivy file, it will create (internally) modify the configuration mapping of your dependencies.
For instance, say you have:

<configurations defaultconfmapping="conf1->other1;conf2->other2">
   <conf name="conf1" />
   <conf name="conf2" extends="conf1" />
</configurations>
<dependencies>
   <dependency name="other-module" conf="conf1" />
</dependencies>

When Ivy parses this file, it will construct the following dependency (in-memory only):

<dependency name="other-module" conf="conf1->other1" />

So, if you now resolve the conf2 configuration, you will only get the other1 dependencies of your other-module.

But when you set confmappingoverride to true, Ivy will construct the following dependency in memory:

<dependency name="other-module" conf="conf1->other1;conf2->other2" />

As you can see, the defaultmappings of the extending configurations are also added (although you didn't explicitly defined them)

When you now resolve the conf2 configuration, you'll get the other2 dependencies of your other-module.

---

Tag: conf Parent: configurations

Declares a configuration of this module. As described in the reference page, a configuration is a way to use or construct a module. Some modules may be used in different ways (think about hibernate which can be used inside or outside an application server), and this way may alter the artifacts you need (in the case of hibernate, jta.jar is needed only if it is used outside an application server). Moreover, a module may need some other modules and artifacts only at build time, and some others at runtime. All those differents ways to use or build a module are called in Ivy module configurations.

The conf element in the configurations section declares one configuration. This declaration gives the name of the configuration declared, its visibility and the other configurations of the module it extends.

Visibility is used to indicate whether or not a configuration can be used from other modules depending on this one. Thus a private configuration is only used for internal purpose (maybe at build time), and other modules cannot declare to depend on it.

A configuration can also extend one or several other ones of the same module. When a configuration extends another one, then all artifacts required in the extended configuration will also be required in the configuration that extends the other one. For instance, if configuration B extends configuration A, and if artifacts art1 and art2 are required in configuration A, then they will be automatically required in configuration B. On the other hand, artifacts required in configuration B are not necessarily required in configuration A.

This notion is very helpful to define configurations which are similar with some differences.

since 1.4 The extends attribute can use the following wildcards:

*	all other configurations
*(public)	all other public configurations
*(private)	all other private configurations

since 1.4 A whole configuration can be declared as non transitive, so that all dependencies resolved in this configuration will be resolved with transitivity disabled. Note that the transitivity is disabled for all the configuration dependencies (including those obtained because this conf extends other ones), and only for this configuration (which means that a conf extending this one with transitivityy enabled will get transitive dependencies even for dependencies being part of the non transitive configuration).
This is very useful to build a compile configuration, for instance, forcing the dependency declaration on each direct dependency, with no risk to forget some because of transitivity.

since 1.4 This tag supports extra attributes.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
name	the name of the declared configuration	Yes
description	a description for the declared configuration	No
visibility	the visibility of the declared configuration. 'public' means that this configuration can be used by other modules, while 'private' means that this configuration is used only in the module itself, and is not exposed to other modules	No, defaults to public
extends	a comma separated list of configurations of this module that the current configuration extends	No, defaults to none
transitive	a boolean to indicate if this conf is transitive or not since 1.4	No, defaults to true
deprecated	indicates that this conf has been deprecated by giving the date of the deprecation. It should be given in this format: yyyyMMddHHmmss	No, by default the conf is not deprecated

Examples

<conf name="core" visibility="private" />
<conf name="compile" extends="core" transitive="false" visibility="private" />
<conf name="runtime" extends="compile" description="everything needed to run this module" />

Declares three configurations, core compile and runtime, with only the runtime one accessible from other modules, and with the compile one being non transitive.
Therefore the core configuration will only be composed of dependencies declared in the core configuration itself, the compile configuration will be composed of all dependencies required in either core or compile configuration, but without transivity (neither for core nor compile dependencies), and runtime will be composed of all dependencies, all transitively, including the dependencies declared only in compile.

---

Tag: include Parent: configurations

Include configurations specified in another file. since 1.3 The included file should have a configurations tag as root tag, which follow the same specification as the configurations tag of the ivy file.

This means that it can contain conf declarations, other file inclusion, and also a defaultconfmapping.

When delivering an ivy file with such an inclusion, the included configuration file is inlined, i.e. ivy remove the dependency on the external file.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
file	the file to include	Yes

Examples

<ivy-module version="1.0">
  <info organisation="myorg"
         module="mymodule"
  />
  <configurations>
    <include file="path/to/included-configurations.xml"/>
    <conf name="conf3"/>
  </configurations>
  <dependencies>
    <dependency name="mymodule1" rev="1.0"/>
    <dependency name="mymodule2" rev="2.0" conf="conf2,conf3->*"/>
  </dependencies>
</ivy-module>

with included-configurations.xml like this:

<configurations defaultconfmapping="*->@">
  <conf name="conf1" visibility="public"/>
  <conf name="conf2" visibility="private"/>
</configurations>

Defines 3 configurations, conf1, conf2 and conf3. mymodule1 is required in each configuration, with for each the same configuration (conf1 is needed in conf1, conf2 in conf2, and conf3 in conf3) due to the defaultconfmapping defined in the included file.

---

Tag: publications Parent: ivy-module

Container for artifact elements, used to describe the artifacts published by this module.

If this container is not present, it is assumed that the module has one artifact, with the same name as the module, and published in all module configurations.
Thus if you have a module which publishes no artifacts (a sort of virtual module, made only to integrate several other modules as a whole), you have to include a publications element with no artifact sub element.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
defaultconf	comma separated list of public configurations in which artifacts are published by default (when no specific configurations are set on the artifact element). '*' wildcard can be used to designate all public configurations of this module. since 2.0	No, defaults to '*'

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
artifact	declares a published artifact for this module	0..n

---

Tag: artifact Parent: publications

Declares an artifact published by this module. This is especially useful for other modules dependending on this one. They thus get all published artifacts belonging to the configurations asked. Indeed, each published artifact declares in which public configuration it is published. Thus a module depending on this module only get artifacts marked with the asked configurations, taking into account configurations extension (see configuration declaration).

The configurations in which an artifact is published can be configured in two ways:

• conf attribute on artifact element
• conf subelement

The twos are equivalent, it is only a matter of preference. However, do not mix both for one artifact.

since 1.4 The artifact element as default values for all its attributes, so if you want to declare a default artifact you can just declare it like that:

<artifact />

If this is the only artifact declared, then it's equivalent to having no publication section at all.

since 1.4 It is possible to give a url at which artifacts can be found. This is not mandatory, and even not recommended. This is only a convenient way to deal with an existing repository with a bad layout, but should not be avoided in an enterprise repository.

since 1.4 This tag supports extra attributes.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
name	the name of the published artifact. This name must not include revision.	No, defaults to the name of the module
type	the type of the published artifact. It's usually its extension, but not necessarily. For instance, ivy files are of type 'ivy' but have 'xml' extension	No, defaults to jar
ext	the extension of the published artifact	No, defaults to type
conf	comma separated list of public configurations in which this artifact is published. '*' wildcard can be used to designate all public configurations of this module	No, defaults to defaultconf attribute value on parent publications element.
url	a url at which this artifact can be found if it isn't located at the standard location in the repository since 1.4	No, defaults to no url

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
conf	indicates a public configuration in which this artifact is published	0..n

Examples

<artifact />

Declares an artifact with the name of the module as name, type and ext jar, and published in all configurations.

---

<artifact name="foo-src" type="source" ext="zip" conf="src" />

Declares an artifact foo-src, of type 'source' with extension 'zip', and published in the src configuration.

---

<artifact name="foo" url="http://www.acme.com/repository/barbaz/foo-1.2-bar.jar" />

Declares an artifact foo, of type and extension 'jar' located at the url http://www.acme.com/repository/barbaz/foo-1.2-bar.jar. This url will only be used if the artifact cannot be found at its standard location.

---

Tag: conf Parent: artifact

Indicates a public configuration in which enclosing artifact is published.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
name	the name of the module public configuration in which this artifact is published. '*' wildcard can be used to designate all public configurations of this module	Yes

---

Tag: dependencies Parent: ivy-module

Container for dependency elements, used to describe the dependencies of this module.
If this container is not present, it is assumed that the module has no dependency at all.

This container let the possibility to define two very similar things: defaultconf and defaultconfmapping.

defaultconf

exists since Ivy 1.1 and enables to define the default conf attribute to use when no conf is defined for a dependency in this ivy file. It is only used when no conf mapping is defined, and has no influence in other cases.

defaultconfmapping

exists since Ivy 1.3 and enables not only to define the default conf mapping when no conf is specified for a dependency in this ivy file, but it also influence the way conf mapping with no mapped conf are interpreted (see configurations doc page for details about this).

Note that if both defaultconf and defaultconfmapping are defined, it's the defaultconfmapping that is used. Note also that if several defaultconfmapping are defined (one in the configurations tag, one or several in included configurations file, and/or one in the dependency tag, then it's only the last which is taken into account, the others will have no effect at all.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
defaultconf	the default configuration to use when none is specified in a dependency. since 1.1	No, defaults to *->*
defaultconfmapping	the default configuration mapping to use in this ivy file. since 1.3	No, defaults to no default conf mapping

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
dependency	declares a dependency for this module	0..n
exclude	excludes artifacts, modules or whole organizations from the set of dependencies of this module since 2.0	0..n

---

Tag: dependency Parent: dependencies

Declares a dependency for this module. A dependency is described by the module on which the current module depends (identified by its name, organisation and revision), and a mapping of configurations.

Fixed and dynamic revisions

The revision can be given as a fixed one (1.5.2, for instance) or as a latest (or dynamic) one. Several possibilities for dynamic revisions are implemented in Ivy:

• latest.integration
selects the latest revision of the dependency module.
• latest.[any status]
selects the latest revision of the dependency module with at least the specified status. since 1.4 For instance latest.milestone will select the latest version being either a milestone or a release, and latest.release will only selects the latest release. Note that in order to find the latest revision with the appropriate status Ivy has to parse all the ivy files in your repository from the last one until it finds such a revision. Hence don't be surprised if the resolution slow down.
See also statuses to see how to configure module statuses.
• end the revision with a +
selects the latest sub-revision of the dependency module. For instance,
if the dependency module exists in revision 1.0.3, 1.0.7 and 1.1.2, "1.0.+" will select 1.0.7.
• version ranges
mathematical notation for ranges can be used to match a range of version. since 1.4 Examples:
[1.0,2.0] matches all versions greater or equal to 1.0 and lower or equal to 2.0
[1.0,2.0[ matches all versions greater or equal to 1.0 and lower than 2.0
]1.0,2.0] matches all versions greater than 1.0 and lower or equal to 2.0
]1.0,2.0[ matches all versions greater than 1.0 and lower than 2.0
[1.0,) matches all versions greater or equal to 1.0
]1.0,) matches all versions greater than 1.0
(,2.0] matches all versions lower or equal to 2.0
(,2.0[ matches all versions lower than 2.0

since 1.4 If you don't find a way to expression your dependency version constraint among these, you can plug your own.
The way to determine which revision is the "latest" between two is configurable through the use of pluggable LatestStrategy. See ivy main concepts for details about this.

Revision constraint

since 2.0 The dependency tag supports two revision attributes: rev, corresponding to the default required dependency revision, and revConstraint, corresponding to a dynamic revision constraint applied on this dependency.

Depending on the resolve mode used, the actual revision used during dependency resolution may vary. These revisions usually differ only for modules published in a repository. When deliver is used, dynamic version constraints are replaced by a stic version constraint, to help build reproducibility. However, the information of the original version constraint is not lost, but rather put in the revConstraint attribute. This both ensure better metadata in the repository while still allowing easier build reproducibility.

Configurations mapping

This mapping indicates which configurations of the dependency are required in which configurations of the current module, also called master configurations.

There are several ways to declare this mapping of configurations, choose depending more on preference than on possibilities. Try to avoid mixing usage in a single dependency element: do not use both nested and inline mapping declaration.

The first way to declare this mapping is called the inline mapping. It is maybe the less natural at first, but it's powerful and concise. Inline mapping can take several forms.

• Specify one configuration name
This means that in this master configuration the same dependency configuration is needed (except if a defaultconfmapping has been specified in this ivy file, see configurations for details, or table below for examples).
For instance, if the current module has defined a configuration named 'runtime', and the dependency too, then having an inline mapping configuration set to 'runtime' means that in the runtime master configuration the runtime dependency configuration is required.

More examples:
The table below indicates how ivy interpret the conf attribute according to how defaultconfmapping is set:

defaultconfmapping	conf	ivy interpretation
		*->*
	runtime	runtime->runtime
	test	test->test
runtime->*;test->default		runtime->*;test->default
runtime->*;test->default	runtime	runtime->*
runtime->*;test->default	test	test->default



• Specify a configuration mapping using the '->' operator separating a comma separated list of master configurations (left operand) of a comma separated list of dependency configurations (right operand).
A good way to remember which side is for the master configuration (i.e. the configuration of the module defining the dependency) and which side is for the dependency configuration is to read the '->' as 'depends on'.

In this case, all specified dependency configurations are required in all specified master configurations.
For instance, 'A, B, C -> E, F' means that dependency configurations E & F are required in master configurations A, B and C.

Note that you can use the wildcard '*' as a configuration name, meaning that all configurations (either master or dependency public ones depending on the side) are wanted. For instance, '* -> B, C' means that B & C dependency configurations are required in all master configurations.

since 1.4 you can use * wildcard followed by negated configurations to mean all but xxx. For instance, '*, !A, !B -> X' means that X dependency configuration is required in all master configurations except A and B.

since 1.2 '@' also has a special meaning as a right operand of the dependency mapping, it means map to self. This is particularly useful with '*', '*->@' meaning that all configurations of the module maps to their equivalent (same name) in the dependency.

since 1.4 '#' can be used as right side operand to mean 'this' configuration, and thus refers to the configuration being resolved. It is slightly similar to @, except that it takes into account the configuration being actually resolved in case of a configuration extending another one.

Example:
Let's foo be a module with two configurations, A and B, B extending A.
Then a dependency declaring conf A-># will get A dep conf in its confs A (when resolving A, ivy will find interpret the # symbol as A) and B dep conf in its conf B (when resolving B, ivy will interpret the # symbol as B, even if this dependency is only required because of the A dependency).

If you don't understand really how this works, do not use it :-)

since 1.4 '%' can be used as left side operand to mean 'all the other configurations'. This can be usefull when you only have a specific mapping for some configurations and a default mapping for all the others.

Example:

test->runtime;%->default

means that the

test

configuration is mapped to the

runtime

configuration, but all the other configurations are mapped to the

default

configuration.

since 1.3 a fallback mechanism can be used when you are not sure that the dependency will have the required conf. You can indicate to ivy that you want one configuration, but if it isn't present, use another one.
The syntax for specifying this adds the fallback conf between parenthesis right after the required conf.
For instance,

test->runtime(default)

means that in the test configuration of the module the

runtime

conf of the dependency is required, but if doesn't exist, it will use the

default

conf instead. If

default

conf doesn't exist then it will be considered as an error. Note that the

*

wildcard can be used as fallback conf.

since 1.4 you can add simple conditions in the dependency mapping. This is done by adding a condition between '[' and ']'. If the condition evaluates to

true

, the mapping is performed. If the condition evaluates to

false

, the mapping will be ignored. For instance,

test->[org=A]runtime,[org=B]default

means that the

test

configuration will be mapped to the

runtime

conf for the dependencies of organisation 'A' and to the

default

conf for dependencies of organisation 'B'.

• Specify a semi-column separated list of any of the previous specs.
In this case, it is the union of the mapping which is kept. For instance, 'A -> B; * -> C' means that B conf is needed in A conf and C conf is need in all master conf... so both B & C dep conf are required in A master conf

If you prefer more verbose mapping declaration, everything is also possible with sub elements mapping declaration.

Artifact restriction

Moreover, the dependency element also supports an artifact restriction feature (since 0.6).
See dependency artifact restriction for details.

Forcing revision

Finally, the dependency element also supports an a force attribute (since 0.8), which gives an indication
to conflicts manager to force the revision of a dependency to the one given here.
See conflicts manager for details.

since 1.4 this tag supports extra attributes

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
org	the name of the organisation of the dependency.	No, defaults to the master module organisation
name	the module name of the dependency	Yes
branch	the branch of the dependency. since 1.4	No, defaults to the default branch setting for the dependency.
rev	the revision of the dependency. See above for details.	Yes
revConstraint	the dynamic revision constraint originally used for this dependency. See above for details.	No, defaults to the value of rev
force	a boolean to give an indication to conflict manager that this dependency should be forced to this revision (see conflicts manager)	No, defaults to false
conf	an inline mapping configuration spec (see above for details)	No, defaults to defaultconf attribute of dependencies element if neither conf attribute nor conf children element is given
transitive	true to resolve this dependency transitively, false otherwise (since 1.2)	No, defaults to true
changing	true if the dependency artifacts may change without revision change, false otherwise (since 1.2). See cache and change management for details.	No, defaults to false

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
conf	defines configuration mapping has sub element	0..n
artifact / include	defines artifacts inclusion - use only if you do not control dependency ivy file	0..n
exclude	defines artifacts exclusion - use only if you do not control dependency ivy file	0..n

Examples

<dependency org="jayasoft" name="swtbinding" revision="0.2"/>

Declares a dependency on the module swtbinding from jayasoft in its revision 0.2. All the configuration of this dependency will be included in all configurations of the module in which the dependency is declared.

---

<dependency org="jayasoft" name="swtbinding" branch="fix-103" revision="latest.integration"/>

Same as above except that it will take the latest revision on the branch 'fix-103' instead of revision '0.2'.

---

<dependency name="mymodule" revision="latest.integration" conf="test->default"/>

Declares a dependency on the module

mymodule

from the same organisation as the module in which the dependency is declared. The latest available revision of this dependency will be used. This dependency will only be included in the test configuration of the module, and it's only the default configuration of the dependency which will be included.

---

<dependency org="apache" name="commons-lang" revision="2.0" force="true" conf="default"/>

Declares a dependency on the module

commons-lang

from apache, in revision 2.0. The revision 2.0 will be used even if another dependency declares itself a dependency on another version of commons-lang. Moreover, if no defaultconfmapping is defined, only the

default

conf of commons-lang will be used in the

default

conf of the master module. If

*->runtime

was declared as defaultconfmapping, then the runtime conf of commons-lang would be included in the default conf of the master module. Note that whatever the defaultconfmapping is, the dependency only be included in the default conf of the master module. The defaultconfmapping only changes the required dependency confs.

---

<dependency org="foo" name="bar" revision="3.0" transitive="false" conf="default->@;runtime,test->runtime"/>

Declares a dependency on the module

bar

from foo, in revision 3.0. The dependencies of bar will themselves not be included due to the setting of transitive. The default dependency conf will be included in the default master conf, and the runtime dependency conf will be included in both the runtime and test master conf.

---

<dependency org="foo" name="bar" revision="3.0" changing="true" conf="compile->runtime(default)"/>

Declares a dependency on the module

bar

from foo, in revision 3.0. This revision is considered to be able to change (

changing="true"

), so even if it is already in ivy cache, Ivy will check if a revision is a more recent last modified date is available on the repository. The runtime conf of bar is required in the compile conf of the master module, but if bar doesn't define a runtime conf, then the

default

conf will be used.

---

Tag: conf Parent: dependency

Describes a configuration mapping for a dependency. See also the inline configuration mapping
in dependency element.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
name	the name of the master configuration to map. '*' wildcard can be used to designate all configurations of this module	Yes
mapped	a comma separated list of dependency configurations to which this master configuration should be mapped	No, default to the same configuration as master one, unless nested mapped elements are specified

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
mapped	map dependency configurations for this master configuration	0..n

---

Tag: mapped Parent: conf

Describes a mapped dependency configuration for a master configuration.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
name	the name of the dependency configuration mapped. '*' wildcard can be used to designate all configurations of this module	Yes

---

Tag: artifact Parent: dependency

This feature gives you more control on a dependency for which you do not control its ivy file.
It enables to specify the artifacts required, if the dependency has no ivy file.

Indeed, when a module has no ivy file, it is assumed that it publishes exactly one artifact having the same name as the module itself. But when this module publishes more artifacts, or simply does not respect the name rule, and if you cannot deliver an ivy file for it (because you do not control the repository, for instance - think about maven ibiblio repository, to give no name), then this feature let you specify the artifacts names you want to get.

Each artifact specification can be given in the context of particular master configurations. By default, if no configuration is specified, artifacts specification apply to all master configurations. But you can specify that a specification applies only to one or several master configurations, using either inline or nested conf specification. In this case, do not forget that if you do not specify any specification for a particular configuration, then no specification will apply for this configuration and it will be resolved not taking into account any specification.

For instance, imagine you have A, B & C master configurations. If you specify art1 in A & B and art2 in A, then C will not be specified at all, and will thus assume the default artifact. To prevent this, you have to specify a configuration mapping for the dependency, mapping only A & B to some or all dependency configurations.

Example:

<dependency org="yourorg" name="yourmodule9" rev="9.1" conf="A,B->default">
  <artifact name="art1" type="jar" conf="A,B"/>
  <artifact name="art2" type="jar" conf="A"/>
</dependency>	

since 1.4 It's possible to indicate the url at which the artifact can be found. This is not mandatory, and even not recommended with an enterprise repository. Note that Ivy will always look at the location where the artifact should be and only use the url if it cannot be found at the standard location in the repository.

since 1.4 This tag supports extra attributes.

since 2.0 This feature can also be used for modules having their own module descriptor, but which doesn't declare an artifact you know that is published. Note that in this case artifacts declared to be published by the dependency will be ignored, so do not forget to include all artifacts you want.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
name	the name of an artifact of the dependency module	Yes
type	the type of the artifact of the dependency module	Yes
ext	the extension of the artifact of the dependency module	No, defaults to type
conf	comma separated list of the master configurations in which this artifact should be included. '*' wildcard can be used to designate all configurations of this module	No, defaults to '*', unless nested conf are specified
url	an url where this artifact can be found if it isn't present at the standard location in the repository since 1.4	No, defaults to no url

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
conf	configuration in which the artifact should be included	0..n

Examples

<dependency org="foo" name="bar" rev="1.0">
  <artifact name="baz" type="jar"/>
</dependency>

Declares a dependency on module bar which only publish one artifact: baz.jar.

---

<dependency org="foo" name="bar" rev="1.0">
  <artifact name="baz" type="jar" url="http://www.acme.com/repository/bar/baz-1.0-acme.jar"/>
</dependency>

Same as above, except that if the artifact is not found at its standard location, Ivy will use http://www.acme.com/repository/bar/baz-1.0-acme.jar to download it.

---

<dependency org="foo" name="bar" rev="1.0">
  <include name="*"/>
  <artifact name="baz" type="source" ext="jar"/>
</dependency>

Declares a dependency on module bar for which all artifacts declared will be used (thanks to the include tag) plus an artifact baz of type source and ext jar (which is not declared in module bar module descriptor).

---

Tag: conf Parent: artifact

Specify a configuration in which the enclosing artifact specification should be included.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
name	the name of the master configuration in which the enclosing artifact should be included	Yes

---

Tag: exclude Parent: dependency

This feature gives you more control on a dependency for which you do not control its ivy file.
It enables to restrict the artifacts required, by excluding artifacts being published by the dependency or any of its transitive dependencies,
even if configuration does not a good separation of published artifacts

The same principle concerning configuration as for include applies to this exclude feature (see the include feature).

Note that exclusion is always done AFTER inclusion has been done.

since 1.3 This exclude feature can also be used not only to exclude artifacts but also to exclude whole modules. Indeed when you exclude artifacts, it doesn't avoid ivy to search for the module itself, and to resolve the dependencies of the module. But you can also exclude the whole module, which means that the module will not be downloaded at all, and so its own dependencies will not be resolved. For sure, this is usually done to exclude not a direct dependency but an indirect one. To exclude a whole module, you just have to not specify any artifact name, type and ext in your exclude rule. For instance:

<dependency name="A" rev="1.0">
  <exclude module="B"/>
</dependency>

since 2.0 A module wide exclude can also be used to exclude dependencies for the whole module (and not only in the context of one dependency as it is the case here).

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
org	the organisation of the dependency module or artifact to exclude, or a regexp matching this organisation since 1.3	No, defaults to *
module	the name of the dependency module or the artifact to exclude, or a regexp matching this module name since 1.3	No, defaults to *
name	the name of an artifact of the dependency module to add to the exclude list, or an expression matching this name (see matcher attribute below)	No, defaults to *
type	the type of the artifact of the dependency module to add to the exclude list, or a regexp matching this name	No, defaults to *
ext	the extension of the artifact of the dependency module to add to the exclude list, or an expression matching this name (see matcher attribute below)	No, defaults to type
matcher	the matcher to use to match the modules to excludes since 1.3	No, defaults to exactOrRegexp in pre 1.3 ivy files, and exact in 1.3 and superior
conf	comma separated list of the master configurations in which this artifact should be excluded. '*' wildcard can be used to designate all configurations of this module	No, defaults to '*', unless nested conf are specified

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
conf	configuration in which the artifact should be excluded	0..n

---

Tag: conf Parent: artifact

Specify a configuration in which the enclosing artifact exclusion should be included.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
name	the name of the master configuration in which the enclosing artifact should be excluded	Yes

---

Tag: include Parent: dependency

This feature gives you more control on a dependency for which you do not control its ivy file.
It enables to restrict the artifacts required by including only the artifacts given here, even if configuration does not a good separation of published artifacts.

Each artifact restriction can be given in the context of particular master configurations. By default, if no configuration is specified, artifacts restriction apply to all master configurations. But you can specify that a restriction applies only to one or several master configurations, using either inline or nested conf specification. In this case, do not forget that if you do not specify any restriction for a particular configuration, then no restriction will apply for this configuration and it will be resolved not taking into account any restriction.

For instance, imagine you have A, B & C master configurations. If you restrict to art1 in A & B and art2 in A, then C will not be restricted at all, and will thus get all artifacts of all dependency configurations if you do not specify a configuration mapping. To prevent this, you have to specify a configuration mapping for the dependency, mapping only A & B to some or all dependency configurations.

Example:

<dependency org="yourorg" name="yourmodule9" rev="9.1" conf="A,B->default">
  <include name="art1" type="jar" conf="A,B"/>
  <include name="art2" type="jar" conf="A"/>
</dependency>		

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
name	the name of an artifact of the dependency module to add to the include list, or an expression matching this name (see matcher attribute below)	No, defaults to .*
type	the type of the artifact of the dependency module to add to the include list, or an expression matching this name (see matcher attribute below)	No, defaults to .*
ext	the extension of the artifact of the dependency module to add to the include list, or an expression matching this name (see matcher attribute below)	No, defaults to type
matcher	the matcher to use to match the modules to include since 2.0	No, defaults to exactOrRegexp in pre 1.3 ivy files, and exact in 1.3 and superior
conf	comma separated list of the master configurations in which this artifact should be included. '*' wildcard can be used to designate all configurations of this module	No, defaults to '*', unless nested conf are specified

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
conf	configuration in which the artifact should be included	0..n

---

Tag: conf Parent: include

Specify a configuration in which the enclosing artifact inclusion should be included.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
name	the name of the master configuration in which the enclosing artifact should be included	Yes

---

Tag: exclude Parent: dependencies

since 2.0 This feature gives you more control on a dependency for which you do not control its ivy file.
It allows to exclude artifacts, modules or organizations from the list of dependencies for the whole module.

It is very similar to the dependency exclude element, except that it applies to a whole module, which can be very useful when a lot of dependencies transitively bring a module you don't want.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
org	the organization of the dependency module or artifact to exclude, or a regexp matching this organization	No, defaults to *
module	the name of the dependency module or the artifact to exclude, or a regexp matching this module name	No, defaults to *
artifact	the name of an artifact of the dependency module to add to the exclude list, or an expression matching this name (see matcher attribute below)	No, defaults to *
type	the type of the artifact of the dependency module to add to the exclude list, or a regexp matching this name	No, defaults to *
ext	the extension of the artifact of the dependency module to add to the exclude list, or an expression matching this name (see matcher attribute below)	No, defaults to type
matcher	the matcher to use to match the modules to excludes	No, defaults to exactOrRegexp in pre 1.3 ivy files, and exact in 1.3 and superior
conf	comma separated list of the master configurations in which this artifact should be included. '*' wildcard can be used to designate all configurations of this module	No, defaults to '*', unless nested conf are specified

---

Tag: override Parent: dependencies

(since 2.0) Specify an override mediation rule, overriding the revision and/or branch requested for a transitive dependency.

This can be useful when a direct dependency is bringing a transitive dependency for which you want to change the revision, without actually declaring a dependency on it (because the module doesn't actually depend on it) and without using conflict management for this purpose (maybe because there is no conflict at all, or because you want to by pass conflict management for this particular transitive dependency).

Overriding is done before any else, in a phase called dependency descriptor mediation. The transitive dependency then behave exactly as if it were declared with the new value.

Note that even though no attribute is required, it makes no sense to set no attributes at all. It would mean that overriding is triggered for all transitive dependencies, but doesn't override anything. Most of the time, at least org or module should be set to override only a subset of transitive dependencies, and at least branch or rev should be set to actually override something.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
org	the name, or an expression matching the name of organisation to which overriding should be applied (see matcher attribute below)	No, defaults to * (match all)
module	the name, or an expression matching the name of module to which overriding should be applied (see matcher attribute below)	No, defaults to * (match all)
branch	the branch to set for all the overriden dependency descriptors	No, by default branch is not overriden
rev	the revision to set for all the overriden dependency descriptors	No, by default revision is not overriden
matcher	the matcher to use to match the modules for which the conflict manager should be used	No, defaults to exact

---

Tag: conflict Parent: dependencies

(since 2.0) Specify a a conflict manager for one or several dependencies.
The way to specify a conflict manager is by giving indication to which dependencies the conflict manager applies (by giving organisation and module names or name regexp), and then specifying the conflict manager, either by giving its name or by specifying a fixed revision list, in which case a fixed conflicts manager is used.

The list of built-in conflict managers available is listed on the conflict manager configuration page.

Conflicts manager are used during the resolve operation, i.e. when ivy analyse the graph of dependencies and download corresponding ivy files and artifacts. The fact to manage conflict at resolve time enables to minimize downloads: when a module is evicted by a conflict manager, it is not downloaded.

There are two things optimized during conflict resolution: download of artifacts and download of ivy files. The first is always ensured by ivy, i.e. artifacts of a module evicted will never be downloaded. The second is not as simple to handle because to know what are the conflicts ivy needs to know the dependency graph, and to know the dependency graph, it has to download ivy files. But ivy is highly optimized on this too, and it tries to evict modules as soon as possible.
That's why the order of dependencies is important for download optimization. Indeed ivy traverses the dependency graph in the order in which dependencies are declared in the ivy files, and each time it encounters a dependency on a module, it first check if there is a conflict on this module, and if this is the case, it asks the conflict manager to resolve the conflict. Then if the module is evicted, it does not download its ivy file, and the whole branch is not traversed, which can saves a lot of time.

If no specific conflict manager is defined, a default conflict manager is used for all modules.

The current default conflict manager is the "latest-revision" conflict manager.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
org	the name, or an expression matching the name of organisation to which this conflict manager should apply (see matcher attribute below)	No, defaults to * (match all)
module	the name, or an expression matching the name of module to which this conflict manager should apply (see matcher attribute below)	No, defaults to * (match all)
manager	the name of the conflict manager to use	Exactly one of two
rev	a comma separated list of revisions this conflict manager should select
matcher	the matcher to use to match the modules for which the conflict manager should be used	No, defaults to exact

---

Tag: conflicts Parent: ivy-module

(since 2.0) the conflicts section is deprecated. Use the conflict instead.

Container for conflict manager elements, used to indicate how conflicts should be resolved
for this module.

The list of built-in conflict managers available is listed on the conflict manager configuration page.

Conflicts manager are used during the resolve operation, i.e. when ivy analyse the graph of dependencies
and download corresponding ivy files and artifacts. The fact to manage conflict at resolve time
enables to minimize downloads: when a module is evicted by a conflict manager, it is not downloaded.

There are two things optimized during conflict resolution: download of artifacts and download
of ivy files. The first is always ensured by ivy, i.e. artifacts of a module evicted will never
be downloaded. The second is not as simple to handle because to know what are the conflicts
ivy needs to know the dependency graph, and to know the dependency graph, it has to download
ivy files. But ivy is highly optimized on this too, and it tries to evict modules as soon as possible.
That's why the order of dependencies is important for download optimization. Indeed ivy
traverses the dependency graph in the order in which dependencies are declared in the ivy files,
and each time it encounters a dependency on a module, it first check if there is a conflict on this module,
and if this is the case, it asks the conflict manager to resolve the conflict. Then if the module is evicted,
it does not download its ivy file, and the whole branch is not traversed, which can saves
a lot of time.

If this container is not present, a default conflict manager is used for all modules.
The current default conflict manager is the "latest-revision" conflict manager.

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
manager	declares a conflict manager for this module	1..n

---

Tag: manager Parent: conflicts

(since 2.0) the conflicts section is deprecated. Use the conflict instead.

Specify a a conflict manager for one or several dependencies.
The way to specify a conflict manager is by giving indication to which dependencies
the conflict manager applies (by giving organisation and module names or name regexp),
and then specifying the conflict manager, either by giving its name or by
specifying a fixed revision list, in which case a fixed conflicts manager is used.

See Conflicts Manager for details on conflicts manager in general.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
org	the name, or an expression matching the name of organisation to which this conflict manager should apply (see matcher attribute below)	No, defaults to * (match all)
module	the name, or an expression matching the name of module to which this conflict manager should apply (see matcher attribute below)	No, defaults to * (match all)
name	the name of the conflict manager to use	Exactly one of two
rev	a comma separated list of revisions this conflict manager should select
matcher	the matcher to use to match the modules for which the conflict manager should be used since 1.3	No, defaults to exactOrRegexp in pre 1.3 ivy files, and exact in 1.3 and superior

---

The main and most frequent way to use ivy is from an ant build file. However, ivy can also be called as a standalone application

If you use ant version 1.6.0 or superior, you just have to add ivy namespace to your project (

xmlns:ivy="antlib:org.apache.ivy.ant"

attribute of your project tag), and you can call ivy tasks.

If you want to make your build handle ivy.jar in either ant lib dir or a local lib dir, you can use a taskdef like this:

<path id="ivy.lib.path">
    <fileset dir="path/to/dir/with/ivy/jar" includes="*.jar"/>
</path>
<taskdef resource="org/apache/ivy/ant/antlib.xml"
         uri="antlib:org.apache.ivy.ant" classpathref="ivy.lib.path"/>

Combined with the antlib definition in the project namespace, it will load Ivy classes either from your ant lib or a local directory (path/to/dir/with/ivy/jar in this example).

If you use ant 1.5.1 or superior, you have to define the tasks you use in your build file. For instance:

  <taskdef name="ivy-configure" classname="org.apache.ivy.ant.IvyConfigure"/>
  <taskdef name="ivy-resolve" classname="org.apache.ivy.ant.IvyResolve"/>
  <taskdef name="ivy-retrieve" classname="org.apache.ivy.ant.IvyRetrieve"/>
  <taskdef name="ivy-deliver" classname="org.apache.ivy.ant.IvyDeliver"/> 
  <taskdef name="ivy-publish" classname="org.apache.ivy.ant.IvyPublish"/>

Note: the tasks listed above are non exhaustive. For a complete list of tasks with the corresponding classes, see the antlib.xml file in svn or the version you use.

Then you can use the tasks, but check their name, following samples assume you use the ivy namespace (ivy:xxx tasks), whereas with ant 1.5 you cannot use namespace, and should therefore use ivy-xxx tasks if you have followed the taskdefs above.

If you use an ant version lower than 1.5.1, you can not use the ivy tasks... you should then call ivy as any external program.

Calling ivy from ant: first steps

Once your build file is ok to call ivy tasks, the simplest way to use ivy is to call the ivy retrieve task with no parameters:

<ivy:retrieve />

This calls ivy with default values, which might be ok in several projects. In fact, it is equivalent to:

<target name="resolve">
    <ivy:configure />
    
    <ivy:resolve file="${ivy.dep.file}" conf="${ivy.configurations}" />
    
    <ivy:retrieve pattern="${ivy.retrieve.pattern}" conf="${ivy.configurations}" />
</target>

Those 3 tasks follow the 3 main steps of ivy retrieving dependencies process:

• First the configure task tells it how it can find dependencies giving it a path to an xml configuration file.
• Then the resolve task actually resolve dependencies described by an ivy file, and put those dependencies in the ivy cache (a directory configured in the configuration file).
• Finally the retrieve task copies dependencies from the cache to anywhere you want in your file system. You can then use those dependencies to make your classpath with standard ant paths.

To understand more accurately the behaviour of ivy tasks, one should know that a property file is loaded in ant by ivy at the beginning of the configure call. This property file contains the following properties:

ivy.project.dir = ${basedir}
ivy.lib.dir = ${ivy.project.dir}/lib
ivy.build.artifacts.dir = ${ivy.project.dir}/build/artifacts
ivy.distrib.dir = ${ivy.project.dir}/distrib
	
ivy.resolver.default.check.modified = false
ivy.default.always.check.exact.revision = true

ivy.configurations = *
ivy.resolve.default.type.filter = *
ivy.status = integration
ivy.dep.file = ivy.xml
ivy.settings.file = ivysettings.xml
ivy.retrieve.pattern = ${ivy.lib.dir}/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]
ivy.deliver.ivy.pattern = ${ivy.distrib.dir}/[type]s/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]
ivy.publish.src.artifacts.pattern = ${ivy.distrib.dir}/[type]s/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]

ivy.report.output.pattern = [organisation]-[module]-[conf].[ext]

ivy.buildlist.ivyfilepath = ivy.xml

ivy.checksums=sha1,md5

For the latest version of these properties, you can check the svn version.

since 2.0 After calling the first Ivy task, the property ivy.version will be available and contains the version of the used Ivy library.

Ivy tasks attributes : generalities

Some tasks attributes values may be given through different places. The three possible places are :

1. task attribute
2. ivy instance
3. project property

The places are queried in this order, so anything set in task attribute will overwrite what would have been found in ivy instance, for example.

The ivy instance considered here is an instance of the class Ivy, which is setup by a call to the configure task, and then reused for other tasks. Because most of the tasks need an ivy instance, they first check if one is available (i.e. configure has been called), and if none is available, then a default configure is called and the resulting ivy instance is used in the remaining tasks (unless another configure is called).

It isn't generally necessary to understand this, but it can lead to some issues if you forget to call configure before another task and if the configure step was required in your environment.

Usual cycle of main tasks

Example

Here is a more complete example of build file using ivy:

<project xmlns:ivy="antlib:org.apache.ivy.ant" name="sample" default="resolve">

    <target name="resolve">
        <ivy:configure file="../ivysettings.xml" />
        
        <ivy:resolve file="my-ivy.xml" conf="default, myconf" />
        
    </target>
    
    <target name="retrieve-default" depends="resolve">
        <ivy:retrieve pattern="lib/default/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]" conf="default" />
    </target>

    <target name="retrieve-myconf" depends="resolve">
        <ivy:retrieve pattern="lib/myconf/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]" conf="myconf" />
    </target>

    <target name="retrieve-all" depends="resolve">
        <ivy:retrieve pattern="lib/[conf]/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]" conf="*" />
    </target>

    <target name="deliver" depends="retrieve-all">
        <ivy:deliver deliverpattern="distrib/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]"
                     pubrevision="1.1b4" pubdate="20050115123254" status="milestone" />
    </target>

    <target name="publish" depends="deliver">
        <ivy:publish resolver="internal" 
                     artifactspattern="distrib/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]" 
                     pubrevision="1.1b4" />
    </target>
</project>

All ivy tasks are documented in the following pages.

---

Sets an ant property for each dependency artifacts previously resolved.

since 2.0 This is a post resolve task, with all the behaviour and attributes common to all post resolve tasks.

Please prefer the use of retrieve + standard ant path creation, which make your build more independent from ivy (once artifacts are properly retrieved, ivy is not required any more).

The property name and value are generated using the classical pattern concept, all artifact tokens and ivy variables being available.

since 2.0 This tag will follow the ant usual behavior for properties. If a property of the same name already exist, it's value will be unchanged. This behavior can be changed using the 'overwrite' attribute.
WARNING : Before 2.0, the behavior was to overwrite the properties. Since 2.0, the default is to not overwrite to properties

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
name	a pattern used to generate the name of the properties to set	Yes
value	a pattern used to generate the value of the properties to set	Yes
conf	a comma separated list of the configurations for which properties should be set	No. Defaults to the configurations resolved by the last resolve call, or * if no resolve was explicitly called
haltonfailure	true to halt the build on ivy failure, false to continue	No. Defaults to true
validate	true to force ivy files validation against ivy.xsd, false to force no validation	No. Defaults to default ivy value (as configured in configuration file)
settingsRef	A reference to the ivy settings that must be used by this task (since 2.0)	No, 'ivy.instance' is taken by default.
overwrite	Overwrite the value of the property if it already exist (since 2.0). Before 2.0, the properties were always overwritten.	No, 'false' by default.

Example

Suppose we have one dependency called mydep in revision 1.0 publishing two artifacts: foo.jar and bar.jar.
Then:

<artifactproperty conf="build" 
       name="[module].[artifact]-[revision]" 
       value="${cache.dir}/[module]/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]"/>

will set two properties:

mydep.foo-1.0 = my/cache/dir/mydep/foo-1.0.jar
mydep.bar-1.0 = my/cache/dir/mydep/bar-1.0.jar

---

since 1.4 The artifactreport task generates an xml report of all artifacts dependencies resolved by the last resolve task call during the same build.

since 2.0 This is a post resolve task, with all the behaviour and attributes common to all post resolve tasks.

This report is different from the standard report which reports all modules and artifacts, whle this report is much simpler and focuses only on artifacts, and gives more information on artifacts, such as the original location and the retrieve location.

It is thus easy to use to generate things like a classpath file for an IDE.

See this article by Johan Stuyts (who contributed this task) to see how he uses this task.

Here is an example of generate file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modules>
  <module organisation="hippo" name="sant-classes" rev="1.01.00b04-dev" status="integration">
    <artifact name="sant-classes-src" ext="zip" type="zip">
      <origin-location is-local="true">
        C:/home/jstuyts/data/ivy/local/hippo/sant-classes/1.01.00b04-dev/sant-classes-src-1.01.00b04-dev.zip</origin-location>
      <cache-location>
        C:/home/jstuyts/data/ivy/cache/hippo/sant-classes/zips/sant-classes-src-1.01.00b04-dev.zip</cache-location>
      <retrieve-location>lib/test/sant-classes-src-1.01.00b04-dev.zip</retrieve-location>
    </artifact>
    <artifact name="sant-classes-unoptimized" ext="jar" type="jar">
      <origin-location is-local="true">
        C:/home/jstuyts/data/ivy/local/hippo/sant-classes/1.01.00b04-dev/sant-classes-unoptimized-1.01.00b04-dev.jar</origin-location>
      <cache-location>
        C:/home/jstuyts/data/ivy/cache/hippo/sant-classes/jars/sant-classes-unoptimized-1.01.00b04-dev.jar</cache-location>
      <retrieve-location>lib/test/sant-classes-unoptimized-1.01.00b04-dev.jar</retrieve-location>
    </artifact>
  </module>
  <module organisation="testng" name="testng" rev="4.6.1-jdk15" status="release">
    <artifact name="testng" ext="jar" type="jar">
      <origin-location is-local="false">
        http://repository.hippocms.org/maven/testng/jars/testng-4.6.1-jdk15.jar</origin-location>;
      <cache-location>C:/home/jstuyts/data/ivy/cache/testng/testng/jars/testng-4.6.1-jdk15.jar</cache-location>
      <retrieve-location>lib/test/testng-4.6.1-jdk15.jar</retrieve-location>
    </artifact>
  </module> 

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
tofile	the file to which the report should be written	Yes
pattern	the retrieve pattern to use to fill the retrieve location information about the artifacts	No. Defaults to ${ivy.retrieve.pattern}.
conf	a comma separated list of the configurations to use to generate the report	No. Defaults to the configurations resolved by the last resolve call
haltonfailure	true to halt the build on ivy failure, false to continue	No. Defaults to true
settingsRef	A reference to the ivy settings that must be used by this task (since 2.0)	No, 'ivy.instance' is taken by default.

Examples

<ivy:artifactreport tofile="${basedir}/path/to/myreport.xml" />

Generates the artifact report for all configurations resolved during the last resolve call (in the same build).

<ivy:artifactreport tofile="${basedir}/path/to/myreport.xml" conf="default"/>

Generates the artifact report for only the default configuration resolved during the last resolve call.

---

The buildlist task enable to obtain a filelist of files (usually build.xml files) ordered according to ivy dependency information from the least dependent to the most one, or the inverse. (since 1.2)

This is particularly useful combined with subant, to build a set of interelated projects being sure that a dependency will be built before any module depending on it.

When the ivy.xml of the modules that you want to order doesn't contains a revision numbers, the rev attributes declared in the dependency is not used.
When the ivy.xml of the modules that you want to order contains a revision numbers, the revision numbers are used. If the revision number doesn't match a dependency description a warning is logged and the modules is considered as different modules.

since 1.3 A root attribute can also be used to include, among all the modules found, only the one that are dependencies (either direct or transitive) of a root module. This can also be used with the excluderoot attribute, which when set to true will exclude the root itself from the list.

since 1.4.1 A leaf attribute can also be used to include, among all the modules found, only the one that have dependencies (either direct or transitive) on a leaf module. This can also be used with the excludeleaf attribute, which when set to true will exclude the leaf itself from the list.

since 1.4 The ivy.sorted.modules property is set in the ant at the end of the task with a comma separated list of ordered modules. This can be useful for debug or information purpose.

since 2.0 The root and leaf attributes can be a delimited list of modules to use as roots. These modules, and all their dependencies will be included in the build list.

since 2.0 By default, all the modules included in a circular dependency are grouped together so that any dependency of any module in the loop will apear before the modules in the loop. This garantee that if there is a depedendency path between a module A and a module B (but no dependency path from B to A), B will alway apear before A even if A is included in a loop in the provided set of modules to sort.
Note that circular dependency can also trigger a failure depending on the value configured in the circularDependencyStrategy of your settings

since 2.0 When you are specifying root or leaf modules you can limit the resulting list to only direct dependencies of the roots modules or to modules that directly depends on your leaf modules.

since 2.0 You can also specify a restartFrom modules. The difference with root or leaf, is that you get a list starting at the restartFrom module followed by all the modules that would be after if the parameter would not be there (even if there is no dependency between the restartFrom and the following module).

Attribute	Description	Required
reference	the reference of the path to set	Yes
ivyfilepath	the relative path from files to order to corresponding ivy files	No. Defaults to ${ivy.buildlist.ivyfilepath}
root	since 2.0 the names of the modules which should be considered as the root of the buildlist. since 1.3 Was limited to only one module name before 2.0.	No. Defaults to no root (all modules are used in the build list)
excluderoot	since 1.3 true if the root defined should be excluded from the list	No. Defaults to false
leaf	since 2.0 the names of the modules which should be considered as the leaf of the buildlist. since 1.4.1 Was limited to only one module name before 2.0.	No. Defaults to no leaf (all modules are used in the build list)
onlydirectdep	since 2.0 true if the resulting list should be restricted to direct dependencies of root modules or modules that directly depends on the leaf modules. This field is ignored when neither root neither leaf is filled.	No. Defaults to no false
delimiter	since 2.0 delimiter to use when specifying multiple module names in the root and leaf properties.	No. Defaults to the comma (,) character.
excludeleaf	since 1.4.1 true if the leaf defined should be excluded from the list	No. Defaults to false
haltonerror	true to halt the build when an invalid ivy file is encountered, false to continue	No. Defaults to true
skipbuildwithoutivy	Deprecated, use onMissingDescriptor instead. true to skip files of the fileset with no corresponding ivy file, false otherwise. If false the file with no corresponding ivy file will be considered as independent of the other and put at the beginning of the built filelist.	No. Defaults to false
onMissingDescriptor	since 2.0 Specify the action to take when no module descriptor file is found for a file of the fileset. Possible values are: head put at the head of the built filelist. tail put at the tail of the built filelist. skip skip the file, which won't be put in the build filelist at all. warn warn and put at the head of the build filelist. fail halt the build with a failure.	No. Defaults to 'head'
reverse	true to obtain the list in the reverse order, i.e. from the most dependent to the least one	No. Defaults to default false
restartFrom	since 2.0 The name of the module which should be considered as the starting point in the buildlist. This allows for the build to be started at any point in the dependency chain.	No. Defaults to no restart point (all modules are used in the build list).
settingsRef	since 2.0 A reference to the ivy settings that must be used by this task	No, 'ivy.instance' is taken by default.

Parameters specified as nested elements

fileset

FileSets are used to select sets of files to order.

Examples

    <ivy:buildlist reference="build-path">
      <fileset dir="projects" includes="**/build.xml"/>
    </ivy:buildlist>

Builds a list of build.xml files sorted according to the ivy.xml files found at the same level (the default value for ivyfilepath is ivy.xml).

This list can then be used like that:

    <subant target="build" buildpathref="build-path" />

---

    <ivy:buildlist reference="build-path" ivyfilepath="ivy/ivy.xml" reverse="true">
      <fileset dir="projects" includes="**/build.xml"/>
    </ivy:buildlist>

Builds a list of build.xml files sorted according to the ivy.xml files found in an ivy directory relative to those build files. The list is sorted from the most dependent to the least one.

---

    <ivy:buildlist reference="build-path" ivyfilepath="ivy/ivy.xml" root="myapp">
      <fileset dir="projects" includes="**/build.xml"/>
    </ivy:buildlist>

Builds a list of build.xml files sorted according to the ivy.xml files found in an ivy directory relative to those build files. Only build.xml files of modules which are dependencies of myapp (either direct or transitive) are put in the result list.

---

    <ivy:buildlist reference="build-path" ivyfilepath="ivy/ivy.xml" leaf="mymodule">
      <fileset dir="projects" includes="**/build.xml"/>
    </ivy:buildlist>

Builds a list of build.xml files sorted according to the ivy.xml files found in an ivy directory relative to those build files. Only build.xml files of modules which have dependencies (direct or transitive) on mymodule are put in the result list.

---

since 1.4 The buildnumber task is similar to the ant buildnumber task, except that it uses ivy repository to find what is the latest version and calculate a new one for you.

When called it sets four properties according to what has been found.
These properties are:

• ivy.revision
the last revision found in the repository
• ivy.new.revision
the new revision calculated from the last one (see below)
• ivy.build.number
the build number found in the repository
• ivy.new.build.number
the new build number calculated from the last one, usually with +1

build numbers are always numbers (composed of digit characters only).
ivy.revision can be not set if no revision was found
ivy.build.number can be not set if no revision was found or if no number was found in it
ivy.new.build.number can be not set if the default new revision to use when no revision is found do not contain any number

The new revision is calculated using a somewhat complex to explain but very easy to use algorithm, depending on which latest version you asked.

Indeed you can ask for a new revision based upon the latest found for a particular prefix (the revision asked), then the new revision will be the one immediately after with only the prefix in common. If no prefix is set the very latest version is searched.

Examples (suppose the latest version of the module is 1.3.1):

revision asked	ivy.revision	ivy.new.revision	ivy.build.number	ivy.new.build.number
1.3	1.3.1	1.3.2	1	2
1	1.3.1	1.4	3	4
2	not set	2.0	not set	0
	1.3.1	1.3.2	1	2

Note that when asking for revision 1, you can get a revision 10.0. To avoid that you can use 1. as revision asked, but in this case ivy won't find revision 1 if its the latest one, and it will thus give 1.0 as new revision. The solution to this problem is to use versions with always the same number of parts (for instance 1.0.0 instead of 1).

Attribute	Description	Required
organisation	the organisation of the module for which a new build number should be calculated	Yes
module	the name of the module for which a new build number should be calculated	Yes
branch	the branch of the module for which a new build number should be calculated	No, defaults to the default branch for this module
revision	the revision prefix for which a new build number should be calculated	No, defaults to no prefix (will find the latest version)
default	the default revision to assume when no revision prefix is asked and no revision is found	No, defaults to 0
defaultBuildNumber	the default build number to use for the first revision	No, defaults to 0
revSep	the revision separator to use when no matching revision is found, to separate the revision prefix from the build number	No, defaults to '.'
prefix	the prefix to use for the property names set (will be prefix.revision, prefix.new.revision, ...)	No, defaults to ivy
settingsRef	(since 2.0) A reference to the ivy settings that must be used by this task	No, 'ivy.instance' is taken by default.

Examples

Here is how it can be used (suppose 1.3.1 is the latest version of ivy in the repository):

<ivy:buildnumber organisation="apache" module="ivy" />

will set 1.3.1 as revision, 1.3.2 as new revision, 1 as build number and 2 as new build number

---

<ivy:buildnumber organisation="apache" module="ivy" revision="1.3" />

will set 1.3.1 as revision, 1.3.2 as new revision, 1 as build number and 2 as new build number

---

<ivy:buildnumber organisation="apache" module="ivy" revision="1.2" />

will set 1.2 as revision, 1.2.1 as new revision, no build number and 1 as new build number

---

<ivy:buildnumber organisation="apache" module="ivy" revision="1." />

will set 1.3.1 as revision, 1.4 as new revision, 3 as build number and 4 as new build number

---

<ivy:buildnumber organisation="apache" module="ivy" revision="3." />

will set no revision, 3.0 as new revision, no build number and 0 as new build number

---

<ivy:buildnumber organisation="apache" module="ivy" revision="1.4-RC" defaultBuildNumber="1" revSep=""/>

If called while no release candidate is in the repository, will set ivy.revision to 1.4-RC1. Then it will increment each time, 1.4-RC2, 1.4-RC3, and so on.

---

Constructs an ant fileset consisting of artifacts in ivy cache for a configuration (since 1.2).

This is a post resolve task, with all the behaviour and attributes common to all post resolve tasks. Note that this task
does not rely on retrieve, because built fileset is made of artifacts direcly in ivy cache.

Please prefer the use of retrieve + standard ant path creation, which make your build
more independent from ivy (once artifacts are properly retrieved, ivy is not required any more).

Built fileset is registered in ant with a given id, and can thus be used like any other ant fileset using
refid.

Attribute	Description	Required
setid	the id to reference the built fileset	Yes
conf	a comma separated list of the configurations to put in the created path	No. Defaults to the configurations resolved by the last resolve call, or * if no resolve was explicitly called
type	comma separated list of artifact types to accept in the path, * for all	No. Defaults to *
settingsRef	(since 2.0) A reference to the ivy settings that must be used by this task	No, 'ivy.instance' is taken by default.

---

Constructs an ant path consisting of artifacts in ivy cache (or origin location with depending on useOrigin setting) for a resolved module configuration.

This is a post resolve task, with all the behaviour and attributes common to all post resolve tasks.

If you want to make your build more independent from Ivy, you could consider using the retrieve task. Once the artifacts are properly retrieved, you can use standard Ant path creation which makes Ivy not necessary any more.

Built path is registered in ant with a given id, and can thus be used like any other ant path using refid.

Attribute	Description	Required
pathid	the id to reference the built path	Yes
conf	a comma separated list of the configurations to put in the created path	No. Defaults to the configurations resolved by the last resolve call, or * if no resolve was explicitly called
type	comma separated list of artifact types to accept in the path, * for all (since 1.2)	No. Defaults to *
settingsRef	(since 2.0) A reference to the ivy settings that must be used by this task	No, 'ivy.instance' is taken by default.

Examples

<cachepath pathid="default.classpath" conf="default" />

Construct an ant path composed of all artifacts being part of the default configuration obtained through the last resolve call.

---

<cachepath pathid="default.classpath" conf="default" useOrigin="true" />

Same as before but will use the original location for local artifacts, and the cache location for other artifacts.

---

<ivy:cachepath organisation="emma" module="emma" revision="2.0.4217" inline="true" conf="ant" pathid="emma.classpath"/>
<taskdef resource="emma_ant.properties" classpathref="emma.classpath" /> 

Resolves the emma module in version 2.0.4217, constructs an ant path with the corresponding artifacts, and then define the emma tasks using this path.

---

since 2.0 Cleans the Ivy cache.

This task is roughly equivalent to:

<delete dir="${ivy.cache.dir}" />

Using the regular Ant delete task is more flexible, since it allows to specify the files to delete. But it requires an Ivy settings to be loaded, and settings scoping is possible only by using suffixed ant property for the cache directory.

This task loads the Ivy settings as any other post settings task, and allows easy scoping with the attribute settingsRef.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
settingsRef	A reference to the ivy settings that must be used by this task	No, 'ivy.instance' is taken by default.

Examples

<ivy:cleancache />

Cleans the cache directory as defined in the loaded settings (by default ~/.ivy2/cache)

<ivy:cleancache settingsRef="mysettings"/>

Cleans the cache directory as defined in the loaded settings identified as 'mysettings'

---

The configure task is used to configure ivy with an xml settings file.

See Settings Files for details about the settings file itself.

since 2.0 The file loaded used to be called configuration file in versions prior to 2.0. The name 'settings' and the use of the ivy.settings.file is new to 2.0.

since 2.0 It is also possible to configure Ivy with the settings declaration. The difference with this task is that when using the settings declaration, the configuration of Ivy will be done when the settings are first needed (for instance when you do a resolve), while the configure task will perform a configuration of Ivy instantly, which makes it easier to see the problem if something goes wrong.

Attribute	Description	Required
settingsId	The settings id useable in the settingsRef attributes of the ivy task that needs a setting. Note that the ivy tasks will search by default for the settings with the id "ivy.instance", which is the default value.	No, defaults to "ivy.instance"
file	path to the settings file to use	No. If a file is provided, url is ignored. If none are provided, then it attempts to find a file at ${ivy.settings.file}, and if this file does not exist, it uses a default settings file
url	url of the settings file to use
override	Specify what to do when another settings with the same id has already been loaded. true the current settings will take precedence over any previously defined setting with this id false the current settings will not override a previously defined setting with this id notallowed an error is raised if a settings has already been defined with this id	No, defaults to "notallowed"
host	http authentication host	No, unless authentication is required
realm	http authentication realm
username	http authentication user name
passwd	http authentication password

HTTP Authentication

Note: HTTP Authentication can be used only if commons-httpclient.jar is in your classpath
If any of the url you use in ivy (especially in dependency resolvers) need http
authentication, then you have to provide the host, realm, username and passwd
attributes of the configure task. These settings will then be used in any
further call to ivy tasks.

Since 1.4:
It's also possible to configure authentication settings for multiple urls. This can be done with the subelements. See the examples for more details.

Examples

Simplest settings

<ivy:configure />

Use either ${ivy.settings.file} if it exists, or the default settings file

Configure with a file

<ivy:configure file="myconffile.xml" />

Configure with an url

<ivy:configure url="http://mysite.com/myconffile.xml" />

Configure multiple URLs which require autentication

<ivy:configure file="path/to/my/ivysettings.xml">
  <credentials host="myhost.com" realm="My Realm" username="myuser" passwd="mypasswd" />
  <credentials host="yourhost.com" realm="Your Realm" username="myuser" passwd="myotherpasswd" />
</ivy:configure> 

---

deliver

Deliver a resolved descriptor of the current module, and possibly perform a recursive delivery of dependencies.

This task does two main things:

Generate a resolved ivy file

This task generates a resolved descriptor of the current module, based upon the last resolve done. The resolved ivy file contains updated information about the delivered module, such as revision and status.

Moreover, all included configurations' files are included in the ivy file, and variables are replaced by their values.

Finally, in the resolved ivy file, dynamic revisions are replaced by the static ones that have been found during the resolve step, so the ivy file can be used later safely to obtain the same dependencies (providing that a revision uniquely identifies a module, which should be the case for proper ivy use).

since 1.3 The replacement of dynamic revisions by static ones can be turned off, so that dynamic revisions are kept in the ivy file. This is an exception to the recommended standard that published module descriptors be fully resolved, so use it with caution.

do recursive delivery

This is done only if a deliver target is given to the deliver task.

If a deliver target is set, then it is called (via an antcall) for each dependency which has not a suffisant status compared to the deliver status set for this task. This means that if you deliver an integration revision, no recursive delivery will be done.

If you deliver a milestone or a release revision, deliver target will be called with each integration dependency.

The deliver target is called with the following properties available:

• dependency.name
the name of the dependency to recursively deliver

• dependency.published.status
the status to which the dependency should be delivered

• dependency.published.version
the revision to which the dependency should be delivered

• dependency.version
the revision of the dependency that should be delivered (the one that was retrieved during last resolve)

Both

dependency.published.status

and

dependency.published.version

can be either asked to the user through ant input tasks (default behaviour), or be always the same for the whole recursive delivery process if the following properties are set:

• recursive.delivery.status
set to the status to which all dependencies requiring to be delivered will be
• recursive.delivery.version
set to the version to which all dependencies requiring to be delivered will be

Usually the deliver target itself triggers an another ant build (using ant task) even if this is up to you to decide.

The delivered ivy file will update its dependency revisions with those given here.

deliver and publish

The deliver task is most of the time not called explicitly, but rather called automatically by the publish task. So, when shall the deliver task be called explictly? When you actually need to separate what is performed by the deliver task (see above), from what is performed by the publish task, i.e. upload a module to a repository.

And this can be particularly useful if you want to process the generated ivy file before uploading it (if you want to add automatically more information like an SCM tag used, the user who performed the release, ...).

It can also be useful if you want to trigger a recursive delivery and then ensure that you get the recursively delivered modules as dependencies. In this case your build order may look like this:
- ivy:configure
- ivy:resolve
- ivy:deliver with recursive delivery
- ivy:resolve again with the ivy file generated by the recursive delivery
- do your build stuff (compile, jar, whatever)
- ivy:publish

Attribute	Description	Required
deliverpattern	the pattern to use for ivy file delivery	No. Defaults to ${ivy.deliver.ivy.pattern}
pubrevision	the revision to use for the publication	No. Defaults to ${ivy.deliver.revision} if set, or the revision resolved if set, or a timestamp
pubbranch	the branch to use for the publication	No. Defaults to ${ivy.deliver.branch} if set, or the branch resolved if set, or nothing (branch info won't be updated)
pubdate	the publication date to use for the publication. This date should be either 'now', or a date given with the following pattern: yyyyMMddHHmmss	No. Defaults to 'now'
status	the status to use for the publication	No. Defaults to ${ivy.status}
delivertarget	the target to call for recursive delivery	No. No recursive delivery is done by default
validate	true to force ivy files validation against ivy.xsd, false to force no validation	No. Defaults to default ivy value (as configured in configuration file)
replacedynamicrev	true to replace dynmic revisions by static ones in the delivered file, false to avoid this replacement since 1.3	No. Defaults to true
settingsRef	A reference to the ivy settings that must be used by this task (since 2.0)	No, 'ivy.instance' is taken by default.
conf	comma-separated list of configurations to include in the delivered file. Accepts wildcards. since 2.0	No. Defaults to all configurations

Example

Deliver an ivy file without the private configurations:

<deliver conf="*(public)" /> 

---

findrevision

since 1.4 Finds the latest revision of a module matching a given version constraint.

A version constraint is what is used when declaring a dependency on a module.
If the module is not found the property is not set.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
organisation	the organisation of the module to find	Yes
module	the the name of the module to find	Yes
branch	the branch of the module to find	No, defaults to the default branch for the given module
revision	the revision constraint to apply	Yes
property	the property to set with the found revision	No, defaults to ivy.revision
settingsRef	A reference to the ivy settings that must be used by this task (since 2.0)	No, 'ivy.instance' is taken by default.

Examples

<ivy:findrevision organisation="apache" module="ivy" revision="latest.integration"/>

finds the latest version of ivy available in the repository and sets the property ivy.revision according to what was found.

---

<ivy:findrevision organisation="apache" module="ivy" revision="1.0+"/>

same as above but only with 1.0 sub versions.

---

info

since 1.4 The info task ease the access to some essential data contained in an ivy file without performing a dependency resolution.

The information is retrieved by setting ant properties:

ivy.organisation	The organisation of the module, as found in the info tag of the ivy file parsed
ivy.module	The name of the module, as found in the info tag of the ivy file parsed
ivy.branch	The branch of the module if any, as found in the info tag of the ivy file parsed
ivy.revision	The revision of the module, as found in the info tag of the ivy file parsed
ivy.status	The status of the module, as found in the info tag of the ivy file parsed
ivy.extra.[any extra attribute]	Corresponding extra attribute value, as found in the info tag of the ivy file parsed
ivy.configurations	A comma separated list of configurations of the module, as declared in the configurations section
ivy.public.configurations	A comma separated list of public configurations of the module, as declared in the configurations section

since 2.0 Since Ivy 2.0 this task has been enhanced to allow you to retrieve information about ivy modules in a repository. Instead of specifying a local ivy file you may specify the organisation, module, revision pattern and (optionally) the branch of the ivy module in the repository you wish to retrieve the information for.

The revision pattern is what is used when declaring a dependency on a module, identical to how the findrevision task works. In fact this task can now be used in place of the findrevision task.

If no matching module is found then no property values are set.

You may now also set the property attribute to change the first part of the property names that are set by this task e.g. if you set the property attribute to 'mymodule' this task will set the ant properties mymodule.organisation, mymodule.module, mymodule.revision etc.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
file	the ivy file to parse	Yes, if you wish to parse an ivy file. No, if you are retrieving information about a module from an ivy repository.
organisation	the organisation of the module to find (since 2.0)	No, if you wish to parse an ivy file. Yes, if you are retrieving information about a module from an ivy repository.
module	the the name of the module to find (since 2.0)	No, if you wish to parse an ivy file. Yes, if you are retrieving information about a module from an ivy repository.
branch	the branch of the module to find (since 2.0)	No, defaults to the default branch for the given module if you are retrieving information about a module from an ivy repository.
revision	the revision constraint to apply (since 2.0)	No, if you wish to parse an ivy file. Yes, if you are retrieving information about a module from an ivy repository.
property	the name to use as the base of the property names set by this task (since 2.0)	No, will default to 'ivy' if not set.
settingsRef	A reference to the ivy settings that must be used by this task (since 2.0)	No, 'ivy.instance' is taken by default.

Examples

Given this ivy.xml file:

<ivy-module version="1.0" xmlns:e="http://ant.apache.org/ivy/extra"> 
	<info organisation="apache"
	       module="info-all"
	       branch="trunk"
	       revision="1.0"
	       status="release"
	       e:myextraatt="myvalue"
	/>
	<configurations>
		<conf name="default" />
		<conf name="test" />
		<conf name="private" visibility="private"/>
	</configurations>
	<dependencies>
		<dependency org="org1" name="mod1.2" rev="2.0"/>
	</dependencies>
</ivy-module>

<ivy:info file="${basedir}/path/to/ivy.xml" />

Parses ${basedir}/path/to/ivy.xml and set properties as described above accordingly:

ivy.organisation=apache
ivy.module=info-all
ivy.branch=trunk
ivy.revision=1.0
ivy.status=release
ivy.extra.myextraatt=myvalue
ivy.configurations=default, test, private
ivy.public.configurations=default, test

Given the same ivy module in a repository:

<ivy:info organisation="apache" module="info-all" revision="1.0" />

will set the exact same set of properties as above. Using:

<ivy:info organisation="apache" module="info-all" revision="1.0" property="infotest"/>

will set:

infotest.organisation=apache
infotest.module=info-all
infotest.branch=trunk
infotest.revision=1.0
infotest.status=release
infotest.extra.myextraatt=myvalue
infotest.configurations=default, test, private
infotest.public.configurations=default, test

---

install

Installs a module and all its dependencies in a resolver. since 1.3 The module to install should be available in a resolver, and will be installed in another resolver which should support publish.

This is particularly useful for users who only have a private repository, and want to benefit from public repositories from time to time. In this case, when a module is missing in the private repository, a call to install let download the module from a public repository not usually used for dependency resolution, and install it and its dependencies in the private repository.

For more details about this task and its usage see the build repository tutorial

Attribute	Description	Required
from	the name of the resolver in which the module must be found	Yes
to	the name of the resolver in which the module must be installed	Yes
organisation	the name of the organisation of the module to install	Yes
module	the name of the module to install	Yes
branch	the branch of the module to install since 2.0	No, defaults to default branch with exact matcher, '*' with any other matcher
revision	the revision of the module to install	Yes
validate	true to force ivy files validation against ivy.xsd, false to force no validation	No. Defaults to default ivy value (as configured in configuration file)
overwrite	true to override modules already present in the destination resolver, false otherwise	No, defaults to false
transitive	true to install the module and all its transitive dependencies, false to install only the module	No, defaults to false
matcher	the name of the matcher to use to find the modules to install	No, defaults to exact
settingsRef	A reference to the ivy settings that must be used by this task (since 2.0)	No, 'ivy.instance' is taken by default.
haltonfailure	true to fail build on unresolved dependencies since 2.0	No, defaults to true

Examples

<ivy:install organisation="apache" module="commons-lang" revision="2.0" from="ivyrep" to="myfsresolver"/>

Installs the module commons-lang from apache in revision 2.0 in the resolver myfsresolver. The module is found in the resolver named 'ivyrep'.

---

listmodules

since 1.4 Finds the list of modules in the repository matching some criteria and set a corresponding list of properties in ant.

The criteria is set by given patterns matching the organisation, name branch and revision of the modules to find.

To know if a module matches the criteria ivy will use the configured pattern matcher.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
organisation	the pattern matching the organisation of the modules to list	Yes
module	the pattern matching the name of the modules to list	Yes
branch	the pattern matching the branch of the modules to list	No, defaults to '*'
revision	the pattern matching the revision of the modules to list	Yes
matcher	the name of the pattern matcher to use for matching the modules fields	No. Defaults to exactOrRegexp.
property	the pattern of the property to set when a module is found	Yes
value	The pattern of the value to set when a module is found	Yes
settingsRef	A reference to the ivy settings that must be used by this task (since 2.0)	No, 'ivy.instance' is taken by default.

Examples

<ivy:listmodules organisation="apache" module="ivy" revision="*" property="ivy.[revision]" value="found"/>

will find all revisions of the module ivy in the org apache, and create one property for each revision found, the name of the property depending on the revision, the value being always 'found'

---

<ivy:listmodules organisation="*" module="ivy*" revision="1.0" matcher="glob" property="modules.[module]" value="[organisation]"/>

use the glob matcher to find all modules which name starts with ivy with revision 1.0, and sets for each a property with module name found and organisation for value.
Example:
modules.ivy=apache
modules.ivyde=apache
modules.ivytools=ivytools

---

makepom

since 2.0 The makepom task allows to convert an ivy file to a pom file.

An example of use is to publish an Ivy managed module to a maven 2 repository.

Note that all Ivy features are not supported by maven poms, so the converted pom may not resolve to the exact same dependencies as the original ivy file.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
ivyfile	the source ivy file to convert	Yes
pomfile	the destination pom file to write	Yes
settingsRef	A reference to the ivy settings that must be used by this task	No, 'ivy.instance' is taken by default.

Child elements

Element	Description	Cardinality
mapping	describes the mapping from an Ivy module configuration to a Maven POM scope. These elements takes two attributes: conf the configuration to map scope the scope to which it should be mapped	0..n

Examples

<ivy:makepom ivyfile="${basedir}/path/to/ivy.xml" pomfile="${basedir}/path/to/module.pom">
   <mapping conf="default" scope="compile"/>
   <mapping conf="runtime" scope="runtime"/>
</ivy:makepom>

Converts ${basedir}/path/to/ivy.xml to a pom and writes the result to ${basedir}/path/to/module.pom. The configuration 'default' in the parsed ivy file will be mapped to the scope 'compile', the configuration 'runtime' will be mapped to 'runtime', and other configurations will be considered optional.

---

post resolve tasks

Several tasks in Ivy are considered as post resolve task and share a common behaviour and settings accordingly.

These tasks are:

• retrieve
• cachefileset
• cachepath
• artifactproperty (since 2.0)
• artifactreport (since 2.0)

All these tasks will trigger automatically a resolve if:

• none has already been called in the current build with the attribute keep set to true (see below)
• organisation and module are not set

Since Ivy 1.4, there are two ways to run a resolve: with an ivy file, or with the inline mode.
When you call resolve with an ivy file, the default for it is to keep the resolved data for use by the subsequent post resolve tasks. When you run an inline resolve, the default is not to keep the data. You can override this behaviour by setting the keep attribute as you like.

If you want to to reuse the resolved data obtained through a call to resolve in another build (i.e. not the current one), then you have to set the organisation and module attributes. This work only if the cache was not cleaned since your last resolve call. This does not work with inline calls, which must be performed in the same build.


The attributes listed are then mostly used only if a resolve is triggered automatically.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
conf	a comma separated list of the configurations to retrieve or '*'. Since 2.0 you can also use '*(public)' or '*(private)'. Note that '*' is interpreted as '*(public)' when inline is true.	No. Defaults to the configurations resolved by the last resolve call, or '*' if no resolve was explicitly called
inline	true to use inline mode, false to resolve an ivy file (since 1.4)	No. defaults false
organisation	the organisation of the module to retrieve. This usually doesn't need to be set since it defaults to the last resolved one, except for inline mode where it is required.	Yes in inline mode, otherwise no, it then defaults to last resolved module name
module	the name of the module to retrieve. This usually doesn't need to be set since it defaults to the last resolved one, except for inline mode where it is required.	Yes in inline mode, otherwise no, it then defaults to last resolved module name
revision	the revision constraint of the module to retrieve. Used only in inline mode. since 1.4	No. Defaults to latest.integration
transitive	true to resolve dependencies transitively, false otherwise since 1.4	No. Defaults to true
haltonfailure	true to halt the build on ivy failure, false to continue	No. Defaults to true
validate	true to force ivy files validation against ivy.xsd, false to force no validation	No. Defaults to default ivy value (as configured in configuration file)
file	the file to resolve if a resolve is necessary since 2.0	No. Defaults to the previous resolved Ivy file or to ${ivy.dep.file}
settingsRef	A reference to the ivy settings that must be used by this task (since 2.0)	No, 'ivy.instance' is taken by default.
resolveId	The id which was used for a previous resolve, or the resolveId if a new resolve is performed (since 2.0)	No, defaults to '[org]-[module]'.
log	the log setting to use during the resolve process. (since 2.0) Available options are: default the default log settings, where all usual messages are output to the console download-only disable all usual messages but download ones. A resolve with everything in cache won't output any message. quiet disable all usual messages, making the whole resolve process quiet unless errors occur	No, defaults to 'default'.

Examples

<ivy:cachepath organisation="emma" module="emma" revision="2.0.4217" inline="true" conf="ant" pathid="emma.classpath"/>
<taskdef resource="emma_ant.properties" classpathref="emma.classpath" /> 

Resolves the emma module in version 2.0.4217, constructs an ant path with the corresponding artifacts, and then define the emma tasks using this path.

---

publish

Publishes the current module's artifacts and the resolved descriptor (delivered ivy file).

This task is meant to publish the current module descriptor together with its declared publication artifacts to a repository.

All the artifacts must have been created before calling this task. It does not create the artifacts themselves, but expects to find them at the location indicated by the artifacts pattern.

The target repository is given through the name of a resolver declared in current ivy settings. See Settings Files for details about resolver supporting artifact publishing.

It also publishes the delivered ivy file (except if you don't want), and even deliver it, if it has not been done with a previous deliver call or if forcedeliver is set to true. That's why this task takes some parameters useful only for delivery. See the illustration below:

since 1.4.1 The source artifact pattern can be specified either as an attribute on the task (artifactspattern) or using a list of nested artifacts element (see examples below).

Attribute	Description	Required
artifactspattern	the pattern to use to find artifacts to publish	No. Defaults to ${ivy.publish.src.artifacts.pattern}
resolver	the name of the resolver to use for publication	Yes
pubrevision	the revision to use for the publication	No. Defaults to the ${ivy.deliver.revision}
pubbranch	the branch to use for the publication	No. Defaults to the ${ivy.deliver.branch}
forcedeliver	true to force the implicit call to deliver, false to do it only if the ivy file to publish doesn't exist yet since 1.4	No. Defaults to false
update	true to update ivy file metadata (revision, branch, publication date and status) before publishing, false otherwise. This is usually not necessary when using deliver before publish.	No. Defaults to false
validate	true to force ivy files validation against ivy.xsd, false to force no validation	No. Defaults to default ivy value (as configured in settings file)
replacedynamicrev	true to replace dynmic revisions by static ones in the delivered file, false to avoid this replacement since 1.3	No. Defaults to true
publishivy	True to publish delivered ivy file, false otherwise	No. Defaults to true
conf	A comma separated list of configurations to publish. since 1.4.1	No. Defaults to all configurations
overwrite	True to overwrite files in repository if the revision already exist, false to let it as is	No. Defaults to false
warnonmissing	True to warn when artifacts to be published are missing	No. Defaults to true
haltonmissing	True to halt build when artifacts to be published are missing	No. Defaults to true
srcivypattern	the pattern to use to find ivy file to publish, and even deliver if necessary (since 1.2)	No. Defaults to the value of artifactspattern
pubdate	the publication date to use for the delivery, if necessary. This date should be either 'now', or a date given with the following pattern: yyyyMMddHHmmss	No. Defaults to 'now'
status	the status to use for the delivery, if necessary	No. Defaults to ${ivy.status}
delivertarget	the target to call for recursive delivery	No. No recursive delivery is done by default
settingsRef	A reference to the ivy settings that must be used by this task (since 2.0)	No, 'ivy.instance' is taken by default.

Examples

<ivy:publish resolver="local" pubrevision="1.0">
   <artifacts pattern="1/[artifact].[ext]" />
   <artifacts pattern="2/[artifact].[ext]" />
</ivy:publish>

Publishes the last resolved module in the local resolver with revision 1.0, looking for artifacts in directories 1 and 2.

---

repreport

Generates reports about dependencies among several modules in the repository (repreport stands for repository report).since 1.4 This task is similar to the report task, except that instead of working on a single module you just resolved, it works with a set of modules in your repository.

Note that the set of modules for which you generate the report is determined by setting organisation module and revision and using a matcher, but also by the dependencies of these modules. No dependency is excluded.

Usually the most useful report is a graph, you can generate either a graphml file that you can then easily layout using yEd, or a dot file which is the format recognized by graphviz, which is a free tool which does automatic graph layout, and can thus be used to generate automatically a GIF or PNG of the dependencies between all your modules.

Limitation: this task requires to be able to browse the repository, and is thus limited to resolvers supporting repository listing. In particular, it means it doesn't work to report all organizations in a repository using m2compatible mode.
Moreover, to be able to list organizations, this task requires an [organisation] token in the resolver(s) used.

Attribute	Description	Required
organisation	A pattern matching the organisation of the modules for which the report should be generated	No, defaults to '*'
module	A pattern matching the name of the modules for which the report should be generated	No, defaults to '*'
branch	The name of the branch of the modules for which the report should be generated	No, defaults to no branch specified
revision	The revision of the modules for which the report should be generated. Only one revision per module will be used, so most of the time keeping the default (latest.integration) is the best thing to do, because it's not very easy to specify only one revision for several modules.	No, defaults to 'latest.integration'
todir	the directory to which reports should be generated	No, defaults to execution directory
outputname	the name to use for the generate file (without extension)	No, defaults to ivy-repository-report
xml	true to generate a xml report, false otherwise	No, defaults to true
xsl	true to generate a report using xslt, false otherwise	No, defaults to false
xslfile	indicates which xsl file should be used to generate the report	Yes if you want to use xsl transformation
xslext	indicates the extension to use when generating report using xsl	No defaults to 'html'
graph	true to generate graphml file, false otherwise	No, defaults to false
dot	true to generate graphviz dot format file, false otherwise	No, defaults to false
matcher	the name of the matcher to use for matching modules names and organisations in your repository	No. Defaults to exactOrRegexp
validate	true to force ivy files validation against ivy.xsd, false to force no validation	No. Defaults to default ivy value (as configured in configuration file)
settingsRef	A reference to the ivy settings that must be used by this task (since 2.0)	No, 'ivy.instance' is taken by default.

Examples

To generate a xml report for all the latest versions of all the modules in your repository:

<ivy:repreport />

---

To generate a graphml report for all the latest versions of all the modules in your repository:

<ivy:repreport xml="false" graph="true" />

---

To generate a xml report for all the latest versions of the modules from the organisation foo in your repository:

<ivy:repreport organisation="foo" />

---

To generate a xml report for all the versions on the 1.x stream of the modules named bar* from the organisation foo in your repository:

<ivy:repreport organisation="foo" module="bar*" revision="1.+" matcher="glob" />

---

To generate an XML report using a custom stylesheet:

<ivy:repreport xsl="true" xslfile="my-custom-stylesheet.xsl" xslext="xml" />

---

To generate an XML report using a custom stylesheet which needs some parameters:

<ivy:repreport xsl="true" xslfile="my-custom-stylesheet.xsl" xslext="xml">
    <param name="param1" expression="value1" /> 
    <param name="param2" expression="value2" /> 
</report>

---

resolve

The resolve task actually resolve dependencies described in an ivy file, and put the resolved dependencies in the ivy cache.
If configure has not been called before resolve is called, a default configuration will be used (equivalent to call configure with no attributes).

After the call to this task, four properties are set in ant:

• ivy.organisation
set to the organisation name found in the ivyfile which was used for resolve
• ivy.module
set to the module name found in the ivyfile which was used for resolve
• ivy.revision
set to the revision name found in the ivyfile which was used for resolve, or a generated revision name if no revision was specified in the file
• ivy.resolved.configurations
set to the comma separated list of configurations resolved

Since 1.2:
An additional property is set to true if the resolved dependencies are changes since the last resolve, and to false otherwise:

ivy.deps.changed

Since 2.0:
The property ivy.deps.changed will not be set (and not be computed) if you set the parameter checkIfCompiled to false. (by default it is true to keep backward compatibility). This allow to optimize your build when you have multi-module build with multiple configurations.

Since 2.0:
In addition, if the resolveId attribute has been set, the following properties are set as well:

• ivy.organisation.${resolveId}
• ivy.module.${resolveId}
• ivy.revision.${resolveId}
• ivy.resolved.configurations.${resolveId}
• ivy.deps.changed.${resolveId}

When ivy has finished the resolve task, it outputs a summary of what has been resolved. This summary looks like this:

---------------------------------------------------------------------
|                  |            modules            ||   artifacts   |
|       conf       | number| search|dwnlded|evicted|| number|dwnlded|
---------------------------------------------------------------------
|      default     |   4   |   0   |   0   |   0   ||   4   |   0   |
---------------------------------------------------------------------

This table gives some statistics about the dependency resolution. Each line correspond to a configuration resolved. Then the table is divided in two parts:

• modules
• number
This is the total number of dependency modules resolved in this configuration, including transitive ones
• search
This is the number of dependency modules that required a repository access. The repository access is needed if the module is not yet in cache, or if a latest version is required, or in some other cases (depending on checkModified, for instance)
• dwnlded
This is the number of dependency ivy files downloaded from the repository. This number can be less than the total number of modules even with a clean cache, if no ivy file is provided for some dependencies.
• evicted
This is the number of dependency module evicted by conflict managers.
• artifacts
• number
This is the total number of artifacts resolved in the given configuration.
• dwnlded
This is the number of artifacts actually downloaded from the repository.

Inline mode

since 1.4 The inline mode allow to call a resolve without an ivy file, by setting directly the module which should be resolved from the repository. It is particularly useful to install released software, like an ant task for example. When inline is set to true, the organisation module and revision attributes are used to specify which module should be resolved from the repository.

Resolve mode

since 2.0 The resolve mode allows to define how Ivy should use dependency revision constraints when performing the resolution.

Two modes are available:

• default
In this mode the default revision constraint (expressed with the rev attribute in the dependency element) is used.
• dynamic
In this mode the dynamic revision constraint (expressed with the revConstraint attribute in the dependency element) is used.

Concurrency

During resolve, Ivy creates a file in the resolution cache. The creation of this file is not aimed to support concurrency, meaning that you can't have two concurrent resolve of the same module, in the same resolution cache, with the same resolveId.

Note for developers:
After the call to this task, a reference to the module descriptor resolved is put in the ant project under the id

"ivy.resolved.descriptor"

.

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
file	path to the ivy file to use for resolution	No. Defaults to ${ivy.dep.file} or nothing in inline mode
conf	a comma separated list of the configurations to resolve, or '*'. Since 2.0, you can also use '*(private)', '*(public)'. Note that when inline is true, the configuration '*' is equivalent as '*(public)'.	No. Defaults to ${ivy.configurations}
refresh	true to force Ivy to resolve dynamic revision in this resolve process, false to use cached resolved revision since 2.0	No. defaults to false
resolveMode	the resolve mode to use for this dependency resolution process since 2.0	No. defaults to using the resolve mode set in the settings
inline	true to use inline mode, false to resolve an ivy file since 1.4	No. defaults to false
organisation	the organisation of the module to resolve in inline mode since 1.4	Yes in inline mode, no otherwise.
module	the name of the module to resolve in inline mode since 1.4	Yes in inline mode, no otherwise.
revision	the revision constraint to apply to the module to resolve in inline mode since 1.4	No. Defaults to "latest.integration" in inline mode, nothing in standard mode.
type	comma separated list of accepted artifact types (since 1.2)	No. defaults to ${ivy.resolve.default.type.filter}
haltonfailure	true to halt the build on ivy failure, false to continue	No. Defaults to true
failureproperty	the name of the property to set if the resolve failed since 1.4	No. No property is set by default.
transitive	true to resolve dependencies transitively, false otherwise since 1.4	No. Defaults to true
showprogress	true to show dots while downloading, false otherwise	No. Defaults to true
validate	true to force ivy files validation against ivy.xsd, false to force no validation	No. Defaults to default ivy value (as configured in configuration file)
settingsRef	A reference to the ivy settings that must be used by this task (since 2.0)	No, 'ivy.instance' is taken by default.
resolveId	An id which can be used later to refer to the results of this resolve (since 2.0)	No, defaults to '[org]-[module]'.
log	the log setting to use during the resolve process. (since 2.0) Available options are: default the default log settings, where all usual messages are output to the console download-only disable all usual messages but download ones. A resolve with everything in cache won't output any message. quiet disable all usual messages, making the whole resolve process quiet unless errors occur	No, defaults to 'default'.
checkIfChanged	When set to true, the resolve will compare the result with the last resolution done on this module, with those configurations	No, default to 'true'

Examples

<ivy:resolve file="path/to/ivy.xml"/>

Resolve all dependencies declared in path/to/ivy.xml file.

---

<ivy:resolve file="path/to/ivy.xml" transitive="false" />

Same as above, but with transitive dependencies disabled.

---

<ivy:resolve file="path/to/ivy.xml" conf="default, test"/>

Resolve the dependencies declared in the configuration default and test of the path/to/ivy.xml file.

---

<ivy:resolve file="path/to/ivy.xml" type="jar"/>

Resolve all dependencies declared in path/to/ivy.xml file, but download only jar artifacts.

---

<ivy:resolve organisation="apache" module="commons-lang" revision="2+" inline="true" />

Resolve the commons-lang module revision 2+ from the repository, with its dependencies.

---

retrieve

The retrieve task copies resolved dependencies anywhere you want in your file system.

This is a post resolve task, with all the behaviour and attributes common to all post resolve tasks.

since 1.4 This task can even be used to synchronize the destination directory with what should actually be in according to the dependency resolution. This means that by setting sync="true", Ivy will not only copy the necessary files, but it will also remove the files which do not need to be there.

The synchronisation actually consists in deleting all filles and directories in the root destination directory which are not required by the retrieve.

The root destination directory is the the directory denoted by the first level up the first token in the destination pattern.
Example:
pattern: lib/[conf]/[artifact].[ext]
root: lib

Attribute	Description	Required
pattern	the pattern to use to copy the dependencies	No. Defaults to ${ivy.retrieve.pattern}
ivypattern	the pattern to use to copy the ivy files of dependencies since 1.3	No. Dependencies ivy files are not retrieved by default.
conf	a comma separated list of the configurations to retrieve	No. Defaults to the configurations resolved by the last resolve call, or * if no resolve was explicitly called
sync	true to synchronize the destination, false to just make a copy since 1.4	No. Defaults to false
type	comma separated list of accepted artifact types since 1.4	No. All artifact types are accepted by default.
symlink	true to create symbolic links, false to copy the artifacts. The destination of the symbolic links depends on the value of the useOrigin attribute (since 2.0)	No. Defaults to false
settingsRef	A reference to the ivy settings that must be used by this task (since 2.0)	No, 'ivy.instance' is taken by default.
log	the log setting to use during the resolve and retrieve process. (since 2.0) Available options are the same as for resolve when used to trigger resolve automatically (see postresolvetask), or the following for the retrieve process only: default the default log settings, where all usual messages are output to the console quiet disable all usual messages, making the whole retrieve process quiet unless errors occur	No, defaults to 'default'.

Examples

<ivy:retrieve />

Retrieves dependencies using default parameters. This usually retrieves all the dependencies of the last resolve call to a lib directory.

---

<ivy:retrieve pattern="${lib.dir}/[conf]/[artifact].[ext]"/>

Retrieves all dependencies of the last resolve call to a lib directory, dependencies being separated in directories named by configuration, each conf directory containing corresponding artifacts without the revision.
For instance, if the ivy file declares two configurations default and test, the resulting lib dir could look like this:

lib
  default
    commons-lang.jar
    commons-logging.jar
  test
    junit.jar

Note that if a dependency is required in the two configurations, it will be copied in the two directories. The download of the dependency is however only made once at resolve time.

---

<ivy:retrieve pattern="${lib.dir}/[conf]/[artifact].[ext]" sync="true" />

Same as before, but with synchronisation enabled.

For instance, if the ivy file declares two configurations default and test, the resulting lib dir could look like this:

lib
  default
    commons-lang.jar
    commons-logging.jar
  test
    junit.jar

And now suppose commons-logging is no longer part of the dependencies of the default configuration, then a new call to retrieve will result in:

lib
  default
    commons-lang.jar
  test
    junit.jar

With no synchronisation, commons-logging would not have been removed by the call.

---

<ivy:retrieve pattern="${lib.dir}/[type]/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]" conf="runtime"/>

Retrieves only the dependencies of the

runtime

configuration in directories named by artifact type. The resulting lib dir could look like this:

lib
  jar
    commons-lang-1.0.jar
    looks-1.1.jar
  source
    looks-1.1.zip

---

<ivy:retrieve organisation="foo" module="bar" inline="true" pattern="${my.install.dir}/[artifact].[ext]"/>

Resolves and retrieve the latest version of the module bar and its dependencies in the directory pointed by ${my.install.dir}.

---

report

Generates reports of dependency resolving. One report per configuration is generated, but all reports generated together are hyperlinked one to each other.

This task should be used only after a call to resolve, even if the call was not done during the same ant build.
In fact, this task uses xml report generated by resolve in cache. So if you call resolve on a module for a given configuration, you can call report safely on this module and this configuration as long as you do not clean your ivy cache.

If you want to have an idea of what reports look like, check this very simple example.
The task also generates a graphml file which can be loaded with the free yEd graph editor.
Then following a few simple steps you can obtain a graph like this one.

since 1.4

If a custom XSL is specified, it's possible to specify additional parameters to the stylesheet.

Attribute	Description	Required
todir	the directory to which reports should be generated	No, defaults to ${ivy.report.todir}, or execution directory if not defined
outputpattern	the generated report names pattern	No, defaults to ${ivy.report.output.pattern}, or [organisation]-[module]-[conf].[ext] if not defined
xsl	true to generate a report (by default html report) using xslt, false otherwise since 1.3	No, defaults to true
xml	true to generate a xml report, false otherwise since 1.3	No, defaults to false
graph	true to generate graphml files, false otherwise	No, defaults to true
dot	true to generate graphviz dot files, false otherwise since 1.4	No, defaults to false
conf	a comma separated list of the configurations for which a report should be generated	No. Defaults to the configurations resolved by the last resolve call (during same ant build), or ${ivy.resolved.configurations} if no resolve was called
organisation	the name of the organisation of the module for which report should be generated	No, unless resolveId has not been specified and no resolve was called during the build. Defaults to last resolved module organisation.
module	the name of the module for which report should be generated	No, unless resolveId has not been specified and no resolve was called during the build. Defaults to last resolved module.
validate	true to force ivy files validation against ivy.xsd, false to force no validation	No. Defaults to default ivy value (as configured in configuration file)
xslfile	indicates which xsl file should be used to generate the report	No, defaults to ivy provided xsl which generates html report
settingsRef	A reference to the ivy settings that must be used by this task (since 2.0)	No, 'ivy.instance' is taken by default.
resolveId	The id which was used for a previous resolve (since 2.0)	No, defaults to '[org]-[module]'.

Examples

To generate a HTML and graphml report:

<report conf="compile" />

---

To generate a HTML report only:

<report conf="compile" graph="false" />

---

To generate an XML report using a custom stylesheet:

<report conf="compile" xslfile="my-custom-stylesheet.xsl" xslext="xml" />

To generate an XML report using a custom stylesheet which needs some parameters:

<report conf="compile" xslfile="my-custom-stylesheet.xsl" xslext="xml">
    <param name="param1" expression="value1" /> 
    <param name="param2" expression="value2" /> 
</report>

---

Using yEd to layout report graphs

yEd is a free graph editor, benefiting from
all the automatic layouts of yFiles. Ivy is able to generate graphs which are readable by yEd.

The graphs generated by ivy are not layed out (in fact it's why we use yEd), so you have to follow a simple sequence of steps to layout the generated graphs.

Preparation

First you have to generate a graphml file. Simply call the report task (see ivy use documentation) for that.

Step 1: open the graphml file

Launch yEd editor, and open the graphml file generated by the report task. You should obtain something like this:

Step 2: ask yEd to adjust nodes size

Step 3: ask yEd to layout nodes

That's all, you should have obtained something like this:


Note that this is only one possibility, test the available layouts yourself, you could find one better in your case.
Once you have layed out the graph, you can either save it with in the same file (but be warned that it will be overwritten at next ivy report call), or another file, export it to jpg, gif, svg, etc. (see yEd site for details).

---

settings

(since 2.0) The settings declaration is used to configure ivy with an xml settings file. The difference with the configure task is that when using the settings declaration, the configuration of Ivy will be done when the settings are first needed (for instance when you do a resolve), while the configure task will perform a configuration of Ivy instantly, which makes it easier to see the problem if something goes wrong.

See Settings Files for details about the settings file itself.

Multiple settings can be defined in a build script. Every task can reference its own settings.

All Ivy variables set during the settings are available in the Ant project as long as they were not set in Ant before (Ant properties are immutable).
Moreover, the variables are exposed under two names: the variable name, and the variable name suffixed by dot + the settings id.
For instance, if you load a settings with the id 'myid', and define a variable my.variable=my.value in the Ivy settings, both my.variable and my.variable.myid will now be available as properties in Ant and equal to 'my.value'. If you later load another settings with the id 'yourid', and in this settings assign the variable 'my.variable' the value 'your.value', in the Ant project you will have:

my.variable=my.value
my.variable.myid=my.value
my.variable.yourid=your.value

Attributes

Attribute	Description	Required
id	The settings id useable in the settingsRef attributes of the ivy task that needs a setting. Note that the ivy tasks will search by default for the settings with the id "ivy.instance", which is the default value.	No, defaults to "ivy.instance"
file	path to the settings file to use	No. If a file is provided, url is ignored. If none are provided, then it attempts to find a file at ${ivy.settings.file}, and if this file does not exist, it uses a default settings file
url	url of the settings file to use
host	http authentication host	No, unless authentication is required
realm	http authentication realm
username	http authentication user name
passwd	http authentication password

HTTP Authentication

Note: HTTP Authentication can be used only if commons-httpclient.jar is in your classpath
If any of the url you use in ivy (especially in dependency resolvers) need http
authentication, then you have to provide the host, realm, username and passwd
attributes of the configure task. These settings will then be used in any
further call to ivy tasks.

Multiple classloader

A special attention should be applied when you have a multi-project build with subant call, using ivy task loaded by a typedef. Indeed in this situation, it is possible to pass settings reference to a subbuild. When you do that, you should take of the classloader. The ivy task of your subant should not be defined in a different classloader than the parent one. This can be achieved by using the loader parameter of the antlib declaration, or avoid to reload the ivy antlib in the subbuild (place the taskdef in a target only executed when the antlib is not yet loaded).

Examples

Simplest settings

<ivy:settings />

Use either ${ivy.settings.file} if it exists, or the default settings file
This simplest setting is implicit.

Configure with a file

<ivy:settings file="mysettings.xml" />

Configure with an url

<ivy:settings url="http://mysite.com/mysettings.xml" />

Configure multiple realms which require autentication

<ivy:settings file="path/to/my/ivysettings.xml">
  <credentials host="myhost.com" realm="My Realm" username="myuser" passwd="mypasswd" />
  <credentials host="yourhost.com" realm="Your Realm" username="myuser" passwd="myotherpasswd" />
</ivy:settings> 

Configure 2 different settings

You can use multiple ivy settings during a build. Then every ivy task should specify the settings it uses using the settingsRef attribute.

 <ivy:settings id="ivy.normal.settings" file="normal_settings.xml" />
 <ivy:settings id="ivy.release.settings" file="release_settings.xml" />

 <ivy:resolve settingsRef="ivy.normal.settings" />
 <ivy:resolve settingsRef="ivy.release.settings" />

---

var

Sets a variable (by name and value), or set of variables (from file or url) in ivy.
Variables are case sensitive.

Contrary to ant properties, ivy variables are mutable. But a problem with this is that you do not control when
variables are substituted, and usually it is done as soon as possible. So changing the value of a variable will
have no effect if it has already been substituted. Consequently, using this task is NOT recommended.
See reference page for details about ivy variables.

Attribute	Description	Required
name	the name of the variable to set	No
value	the value of the variable to set	Yes when using the name attribute
file	the filename of the property file to load as ivy variables	One of these, when not using the name attribute
url	the url from which to read ivy variables
prefix	Prefix to apply to variables. A "." is appended to the prefix if not specified.	No
settingsRef	A reference to the ivy settings that must be used by this task (since 2.0)	No, 'ivy.instance' is taken by default.

---

Using standalone

Ivy can be used as a standalone program very easily. All you need is a java 1.4+ runtime environment (JRE)!

Then here is how to call it:

java -jar ivy.jar -?

It will display an online help like this:

==== settings options
 -settings <settingsfile>     use given file for settings
 -cache <cachedir>            use given directory for cache
 -novalidate                  do not validate ivy files against xsd
 -m2compatible                use maven2 compatibility

==== resolve options
 -ivy <ivyfile>               use given file as ivy file
 -dependency <organisation> <module> <revision>
                              use this instead of ivy file to do the rest of the
                               work with this as a dependency.
 -confs <configurations>      resolve given configurations

==== retrieve options
 -retrieve <retrievepattern>  use given pattern as retrieve pattern
 -sync                        use sync mode for retrieve

==== cache path options
 -cachepath <cachepathfile>   outputs a classpath consisting of all dependencies
                               in cache (including transitive ones) of the given
                               ivy file to the given cachepathfile

==== deliver options
 -deliverto <ivypattern>      use given pattern as resolved ivy file pattern

==== publish options
 -publish <resolvername>      use given resolver to publish to
 -publishpattern <artpattern> use given pattern to find artifacts to publish
 -revision <revision>         use given revision to publish the module
 -status <status>             use given status to publish the module

==== http auth options
 -realm <realm>               use given realm for HTTP AUTH
 -host <host>                 use given host for HTTP AUTH
 -username <username>         use given username for HTTP AUTH
 -passwd <passwd>             use given password for HTTP AUTH

==== launcher options
 -main <main>                 the FQCN of the main class to launch
 -args <args>                 the arguments to give to the launched process
 -cp <cp>                     extra classpath to use when launching process

==== message options
 -debug                       set message level to debug
 -verbose                     set message level to verbose
 -warn                        set message level to warn
 -error                       set message level to error

==== help options
 -?                           display this help
 -deprecated                  show deprecated options

since 1.3 System properties are included as ivy variables, so you can easily define an ivy variable like this:

java -Dmyivyvar=myvalue org.apache.ivy.Main [parameters]

Examples

java -jar ivy.jar

calls ivy with default configuration using ivy.xml in the current dir

---

java -jar ivy.jar -settings path/to/myivysettings.xml -ivy path/to/myivy.xml

calls ivy with given ivysettings file using given ivy file

---

since 1.3

java -jar ivy.jar -settings path/to/myivysettings.xml -dependency apache commons-lang 2.0

calls ivy with given ivysettings file and resolve apache commons-lang 2.0.

This is equivalent to:

java -jar ivy.jar -settings path/to/myivysettings.xml -ivy ivy.xml

with ivy.xml like this:

<ivy-module version="1.0">
  <info organisation="org"
       module="standalone"
       revision="working"
   />
  <dependencies>
    <dependency org="apache" name="commons-lang" rev="2.0" conf="default->*"/>
  </dependencies>
</ivy-module>

---

since 1.3

java -jar ivy.jar -settings path/to/myivysettings.xml -ivy path/to/myivy.xml -cachepath mycachefile.txt

calls ivy with given ivysettings file and resolve the dependencies found in the given ivy file, and then output the classpath of resolved artifacts in cache in a file. This file can then be used to define a classpath corresponding to all the resolved dependencies for any java program.

---

since 1.4

java -jar ivy.jar -settings path/to/myivysettings.xml -dependency bar foo 2.0 -main org.bar.foo.FooMain

calls ivy with given ivysettings file and resolve bar foo 2.0, and then run org.foo.FooMain class with the resolved artifacts as classpath

---

Developer doc

Building from source

To build Ivy from source it's really easy.

Requirements

All you need is

• an svn client
to check out Ivy sources from apache svn, not required if you build from sources packaged in a release
• Apache Ant 1.6.0 or greater
We recommend either ant 1.6.5 or 1.7.0
• junit 3.8.2 jar in your ant lib
this is not required if you use ant 1.7
• a jdk 1.4 or greater
Build instructions have been successfully tested with sun jdk 1.4.2, 1.5.0 and 1.6.0

Procedure

Get the source

You can either get the sources from a release, or get them directly from svn. For instance, to get the trunk version:

svn co https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/ant/ivy/core/trunk ivy

Build

Go to the directory where you get the Ivy sources (you should see a file named build.xml) and run:

ant

Check the result

The ant build will compile the core classes of Ivy and use them to resolve the dependencies (used for some optional features). Then it will compile and run tests with coverage metrics.

If everything goes well, you should see the message

BUILD SUCCESSFUL

Then you can check the test results in the build/doc/reports/test directory, the jars are in build/artifacts, and the test coverage report in build/doc/reports/coverage

Coding conventions

The Ivy code base is supposed to follow the standard java conventions:
http://java.sun.com/docs/codeconv/html/CodeConvTOC.doc.html

This is a work in progress though (see IVY-511), but patches helping migration to these conventions are welcome.

Developing with eclipse

Even though you can develop Ivy with your IDE of choice, we support eclipse development by providing ad hoc metadata.

We currently provide two options:

Eclipse alone

To develop with a simple eclipse install all you need is eclipse 3.1 or greater, with no particular plugin.
First call the following ant target in your Ivy workspace:

ant eclipse-default

This will resolve the dependencies of Ivy and produce a .classpath using the resolved jars for the build path.
Then you can use the "Import->Existing project into workspace" eclipse feature to import the Ivy project in your workspace.

Eclipse + IvyDE

You can also leverage the latest IvyDE version to be able to easily resolve the ivy dependencies from Eclipse.
To do so all you need is call the following ant target in your Ivy workspace:

ant eclipse-ivyde

or if you don't have ant installed you can simply copy the file .classpath.ivyde and rename it to .classpath
Then you can import the project using "Import->Existing project into workspace" as long as you already have latest IvyDE installed.

To install latest IvyDE version compatible with the latest Ivy used to resolve Ivy dependencies, you will need to use a snapshot build, not endorsed by the ASF, available here:
http://people.apache.org/~xavier/ivyde/snapshot/

Download the file and unzip its content in your eclipse installation directory.

recommended plugins

The Ivy project comes with settings for the checkstyle plugin we recommend to use to avoid introducing new disgression to the checkstyle rules we use.
If you use this plugin, you will many errors in Ivy. As we said, following strict checkstyle rules is a work in progress and we used to have pretty different code conventions (like using _ as prefix for private attributes), so we still have things to fix. We usually use the filter in the problems view to filter out checkstyle errors from this view, which helps to know what the real compilation problem are.

Besides this plugin we also recommend to use a subversion plugin, subversive or subclipse being the two options currently available in the open source landscape.

---

Extending Ivy

Many things are configurable in Ivy, and many things are available with Ivy core. But when you want to do something not built in ivy core, you can still plug your own code.

Many things are pluggable in Ivy:

• module descriptor parsers
• dependency resolvers
• lock strategies
• latest strategies
• circular dependency strategies
• conflict managers
• report outputters
• version matchers
• triggers

Before trying to implement your own, we encourage you to check if the solution to your problem cannot be addressed by existing features, or by contributed ones. Do not hesitate to ask for help on the mailing-lists.

If you still don't find what you need, then you'll have to develop your own plugin or find someone who could do that for you.

All ivy plug-ins use the same code patterns as ant specific tasks for parameters. This means that if you want to have a "myattribute" of type String, you just have to declare a method called setMyattribute(String val) on your plug-in. The same applies to child tags, you just have to follow Ant specifications.

All pluggable code in Ivy is located in the org.apache.ivy.plugins package. In each package you will find an interface that you must implement to provide a new plugin. We usually also provide an abstract class easing the implementation and making your code more independent of interface changes. We heavily recommend using these abstract classes as a base class.

To understand how your implementation can be done, we suggest looking at existing implementations we provide, it's the best way to get started.

---

Making a release

Making a release

Requirements

Requirements for making a release are similar to the requirements for building from source, except that sun jdk 1.6 and ant 1.7 are required.

Procedure

1. Check the files which needs to be updated for the release.

On the trunk, check that files which require update for the release are up to date.
This includes particularly:
RELEASE_NOTES
CHANGES
README

2. Create a release branch

This will allow to work separately from other developers, in case you need any last modification.

svn copy https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/ant/ivy/core/trunk \
           https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/ant/ivy/core/branches/2.0.0-beta1 \
      -m "Creating a release branch for 2.0.0-beta1."

3. Check out the branch

svn co https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/ant/ivy/core/branches/2.0.0-alpha1 ivy-2.0.0-beta1

4. Prepare the files which need to be updated for the release.

Check again that files have proper revision information.
It's also time to update the documentation template files which will be used for doc generation to include the version information in the page title.
For instance in

doc/template.html
doc/printTemplate.html

replace

<title>${title} | Ivy Documentation</title>

by

<title>${title} | Ivy 2.0.0-beta1 Documentation</title>

You also need to store the current ivy xml schema in the documentation, so that it will later be accessible on public web site. To do so, run the following command in the directory in which you checked out the release branch:

ant -f build-release.xml release-xsd

5. Add release note page in the documentation.

Open the file doc/index.html with your favorite browser, and click on the plus button in the upper right. Choose "Release Notes" as title, and "release-notes" as page id.

Then edit the page (hit the first button at the upper right), and copy the content of the RELEASE_NOTES file.

You can also add the announcement for the release if it's already ready. If this is an incubator version, add the usual incubator disclaimer too.

Move the page up in the TOC using the arrow button in the toolbar at the upper right, so that it's the first child page under the "Documentation" page.

If you take the time to make the content of the release notes more "xooki compliant" (by removing unnecessary end of lines and adding h2 h3 and h4 tags), the page could then look like something like that:
http://ant.apache.org/ivy/history/2.0.0-alpha-1.html

6. Commit your changes

svn status
svn add doc/ivy.xsd
svn add doc/release-notes.html
svn ci -m "update templates, add release notes and ivy.xsd in documentation."

7. Check that you have no pending modifications

svn status

If your working copy is clean, you can launch the release script. If it isn't, make sure to clean it properly. Sometimes you may need to call ant clean-all if you have started to work with ant builds. If you are confused about your working copy state, delete it and check it out again.

8. Launch the release script

ant -f build-release.xml release

The status should be release only for final releases, and milestone for any other intermediate release.
If anything is wrong, fix and go back to step 4.
If the release script is successful, release artifacts will be waiting for you in the build/distrib directory.

9. Verify the release

Check that all zips can be opened correctly, and that running 'ant' after unzipping the source distribution works properly.
You can also do a smoke test with the generated ivy.jar , to see if it is able to resolve properly a basic module (for instance you can run some tutorials provided in the src/example directory in all distributions).

10. Sign and upload the artifacts

It's now time to sign the release artifacts and upload them to a location accessible by other Apache commiters.

Here is a simple way to sign the files using gnupg:

gpg --armor --output file.zip.asc --detach-sig file.zip

Here is a ruby script you can use to sign the files:

require 'find'

Find.find('build/distrib') do |f| 
    `gpg --armor --output #{f}.asc --detach-sig #{f}` if File.file?(f) && ['.zip', '.gz', '.jar', '.pom'].include?(File.extname(f))
end

Be prepared to enter your passphrase several times if you use this script, gpg will ask for your passphrase for each file to sign.

When you're done upload the content of the distrib directory to a publicly accessible web site, your apache personal site being a good location for this. Make sure you include some kind of disclaimer somewhere to inform people the release is not approved yet.

You can for example add a HEADER.html like this:

<h2>WARNING: files available here are NOT an Apache approved release yet.</h2>

11. Prepare the Eclipse update site

To be able to test the release within IvyDE, it can be deployed in the IvyDE update site. See that page to know how to process.

12. Call for a vote to approve the release

Cast a vote to approve the release on the dev@ant.apache.org mailing list.

Here is an example:

Subject: [VOTE] Ivy ${version} Release

I have built a release candidate for Ivy ${version}

You can download it from this URL: ${url}

Do you vote for the release of these binaries?

[ ] Yes
[ ] No

Regards,

${me}, Ivy ${version} release manager

13. Tag the svn repository

Now that the release is approved, it is time to tag the svn repo

svn copy https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/ant/ivy/core/branches/2.0.0-beta1 \
           https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/ant/ivy/core/tags/2.0.0-beta1 \
      -m "Tag release 2.0.0-beta1."

14. Upload to public repository

If the release is approved, it's now time to make it public by uploading it to the public Apache distrib repository (i.e. /www/www.apache.org/dist/ant/ivy/[version] on people.a.o).

Copy also the staging maven 2 repository to apache maven 2 rsync repo:
/www/people.apache.org/repo/m2-ibiblio-rsync-repository

15. Update the web site

Add a link to the released version documentation in the web site.

To do so, you need to:

1. add a svn externals reference to the documentation
edit the svn properties of site/history, and in the svn:externals property, add a line like this one:

2.0.0-beta1 https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/ant/ivy/core/branches/2.0.0-beta1/doc

You can also change the latest-milestone and/or latest-release if necessary.

You can use "svn propedit svn:externals path/to/history" to do so.

Once you've changed the property, use "svn up" to checkout the proper documentation.
2. edit the toc.json file in the site component of Ivy
and add something like that:

{
   "title":"2.0.0-beta1",
   "importRoot":"history/2.0.0-beta1",
   "importNode":"index"      
}

You can also edit the title of the main documentation node pointing to latest-milestone / latest-release if necessary.

3. Add a call to init-imported-version in site/build.xml
In the init-imported-history target, add a task call like this one:

<init-imported-version version="2.0.0-beta1" />

Then launch "ant init-imported-history" in the site directory, and check the documentation now has the released version in the history, and that this documentation can be accessed with no problem with a unified TOC.

Then you can update the release notes page of the imported documentation if necessary, to include the announcement for example.

It's time to update the download image used on the home page and the download page. Use site/images/ivy-dl.xcf as a basis if you have gimp installed. Then you can update the home page to refer to this image, and add a news item announcing the new version. Update also the download page with the new image and update the links to the download location (using a search/replace on the html source is recommended for this).

You are now ready to commit your changes (make sure to commit changes in imported locations too), and update the online site:

ant clean publish-site

16. Deploy the Eclipse updatesite

If the Eclipse update site has already been prepared to include that new Ivy release, it is now needed to be deployed. Then follow the deployment instruction on that page.

17. Announce

Announce the release on the dev@ant.a.o, ivy-user@ant.a.o, user@ant.apache.org and announce@apache.org mailing lists.
You can also announce the release on popular web sites, like freshmeat.net (xavier is the owner of the Ivy project on freshmeat), javalobby.org, theserverside.com, dzone.com, ...

16. Update this doc

If you feel like anything is missing or misleading in this release doc, update it as soon as you encounter the problem.

17. Merge your modifications back to the trunk if necessary.

Modifications on the template files do not need to be merged, but if you had troubles during your release you may want to merge your fixes back to the trunk.

18. Prepare next release

Update the file version.properties with the version of the next release so that anyone building from the trunk will obtain jar with the correct version number.

Release the version in jira, and create a new unreleased version for the next planned version.

---

Updating the updatesite

Once a release have been build for Ivy or IvyDE, they should be pushed to the Eclipse updatesite so that Eclipse users will be able to update automatically their installed version of Ivy or IvyDE.

This doc is in two parts, the setup of the updatesite which will be the candidate for the vote of the Ivy or IvyDE release, and the final deployment once the release is accepted.

Important note: in this doc, the released version is denoted as $VERSION (and have to be replaced accordingly in every commands), but this is the OSGi one, not the usually shown one, in particular for release candidate versions. For instance an Ivy version can be 2.0.0-RC1 but the OSGi one, and the one to use here is 2.0.0.cr1.

Build the updatesite

Push the new version

The update site svn location is there: https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/ant/ivy/updatesite/trunk . You will update it so it will contain the new artifacts.

• For an Ivy release:
  The new ivy bundle have to be placed in the plugins directory of the updatesite. So you should do something like:

  cp ..../ivy.jar dist/plugins/org.apache.ivy_$VERSION.jar

  Then Eclipse needs a feature, which will be generated at the right place with an ant target:

  ant generate-ivy-feature -Divy.version=$VERSION

• For an IvyDE release:
  The zip distribution needs to be unpacked into the updatesite directory:

  cd dist
  unzip ..../org.apache.ivyde.feature-$VERSION.zip
  

Then the deprecated versions of the plugins and the features should be removed.

Update the site.xml

The site.xml file in the dist directory should be edited so it will reference the new artifacts. You should just change the version number accordingly to the release.

Prepare the update site

The update site is optimized: the metadata of the features are aggregated into the digest.zip, and the jar of the plugins are compressed with a better algorithm.

To accomplish this task, just run at the root of your working copy of the updatesite:

• For an Ivy release:

  ant optimize-ivy
  

• For an IvyDE release:

  ant optimize-ivyde
  

The binary files then need to be signed and their checksum computed. For the checksums, run:

ant checksum

And sign the binaries:

• For an Ivy release:

  ./signIvyArtifacts.sh

• For an IvyDE release:

  ./signIvyDEArtifacts.sh

Note: these previous targets may optimize, checksum and sign already released artifacts. Just so a svn status to check the modified artifacts; the only modified files should be the digest.zip (with its signature and checksum) and the site.xml; then there should be the added files of the release. Then do some svn revert file to revert the unexpected changes.

And finally commit your changes.

Test the updatesite

The updatesite is ready to be tested. You can deploy it where ever you want with the command:

svn export https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/ant/ivy/updatesite/trunk/dist updatesite

For both local and remote testing, as the new jars are not yet deployed on Apache mirrors, the updatesite mirroring have to be disable.
Basically it is just about modifying the site.xml and remove the reference to the eclipse-update--xml files: remove the attribute mirrorsURL.

To let the developper community test the updatesite, you can setup a staging updatesite in your public_html directory on people.apache.org. So if you deploy it on people.apache.org, in the directory ~/public_html/staging, then the developpers should setup the updatesite with the URL http://people.apache.org/~LOGIN/staging/updatesite .

Deployment of a release

The release is accepted, so we can tag the updatesite:

svn cp https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/ant/ivy/updatesite/trunk https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/ant/ivy/updatesite/tags/$TAGNAME

with $TAGNAME the name of the release, so it would be either ivy-$VERSION or ivyde-$VERSION.

Then backup and deploy. On people.apache.org:

cd /www/www.apache.org/dist/ant/ivyde/
mv updatesite ~/updatesite.backup
svn export https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/ant/ivy/updatesite/tags/$TAGNAME/dist updatesite

Deprecated updatesite

The updatesite needs to be also deployed in its deprecated location, in the IvyDE website.

In your local svn working copy do:

cp updatesite/trunk/dist/digest.zip* site/ivyde/updatesite
cp updatesite/trunk/dist/site.xml site/ivyde/updatesite

And commit the changes of the website.
Next is the usual IvyDE website deployment:

ant generate-site-ivyde
svn ci target/ivyde/updatesite

And on people.apache.org:

svn up /www/ant.apache.org/ivy/ivyde/updatesite