Apache Rat Ant Task Library

The Ant Task Library provides a single Ant task and a few supporting Ant types to run Rat, the Release Audit Tool, from inside Apache Ant.

Using Ant's resource abstraction the task can be used to check files on disk as well as tarballs or even URLs directly.

Requirements

The Rat Ant Task Library requires Apache Ant 1.7.1 or higher (it works well with 1.8.x), Apache Rat core and transitively all dependencies of Apache Rat core.

In order to use the tasks Java 5 is required as of Rat 0.9 - Rat 0.8 and earlier require Java 1.4.

Installation

There are several ways to use the Antlib:

  • The traditional way: 
    <taskdef
    resource="org/apache/rat/anttasks/antlib.xml">
    <classpath>
        <pathelement location="YOUR-PATH-TO/apache-rat-${version}.jar"/>
    </classpath>
</taskdef>

    With this you can use the report task like plain Ant tasks, they'll live in the default namespace. I.e. if you can run exec without any namespace prefix, you can do so for report as well.

  • Similar, but assigning a namespace URI 
    <taskdef
    uri="antlib:org.apache.rat.anttasks"
    resource="org/apache/rat/anttasks/antlib.xml">
    <classpath>
        <pathelement location="YOUR-PATH-TO/apache-rat-${version}.jar"/>
    </classpath>
</taskdef>

    This puts your task into a separate namespace than Ant's namespace. You would use the tasks like

    <project
    xmlns:rat="antlib:org.apache.rat.anttasks"
    xmlns="antlib:org.apache.tools.ant">
    ...
    <rat:report>
        <fileset dir="src"/>
    </rat:report>

    or a variation thereof.

  • Using Ant's autodiscovery. Place apache-rat-tasks.jar and all dependencies into a directory and use ant -lib DIR-CONTAINING-THE-JAR or copy it into ANT_HOME/lib - and then in your build file, simply declare the namespace on the project tag: 
    <project
    xmlns:rat="antlib:org.apache.rat.anttasks"
    xmlns="antlib:org.apache.tools.ant">

    and all tasks of this library will automatically be available in the rat namespace without any taskdef.