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


h2(#why).  Why Buildr Rocks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

h2(#what).  What You Get

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

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


h2(#news).  What's New

Highlights from Buildr 1.4.7 (May 29th, 2012)

* Added:  BUILDR-618 pom properties feature does not support hierarchy (kafka liu)
* Added:  Add a Sonar extension.
* Added:  BUILDR-316 Add a GWT extension
* Added:  Enhance the IDEA extension to support the addition of several explicit facets such as ejb, jruby, jpa, web and gwt.
* Added:  Add a Findbugs extension.
* Added:  Add a Checkstyle extension.
* Added:  Add a JavaNCSS extension.
* Added:  Add a PMD extension.
* Added:  MultiTest framework that allows combining multiple test frameworks for a single project.
* Added:  Scala Specs2 framework support.
* Added:  Buildr.transitive() now accepts hash with :scopes, :optional and :scopes_transitive parameters
* Added:  Improved scala file change detection (to avoid recompiling  unnecessarily)
* Added:  ScalaTest now automatically loads the Mockito library
* Added:  Enhance the Intellij IDEA extension to support the addition of "artifacts" and "configurations" to the generated project file.
* Added:  BUILDR-598 TestNG support for :groups and :excludegroups (Christopher Coco)
* Change: BUILDR-638 Update to rake 0.9.2.2 (Russell Teabeault)
* Change: Default maven2 repository is now repo1.maven.org/maven2.
* Change: Scala 2.9.1 is now default
* Change: BUILDR-548 Remove support for JTestR as it is no longer maintained (Antoine Toulme)
* Fixed:  Handle HTTP Unauthorized (501) result code when downloading artifacts.
* Fixed:  BUILDR-611 Buildr should not unnecessarily recompile Java files explicitly added to compile.from
* Fixed:  scaladoc generation with scala 2.9.x
* Fixed:  BUILDR-439 "The command line is too long" when running TestNG tests (Tammo Van Lessen)
* Fixed:  BUILDR-617 pom exclusion does not work (Kafka Liu)

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

h2(#notices).  Credits & Notices

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

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

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

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

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

