How to run OpenRewrite against Ant projects?

[paulbarr]

I have a build that uses ant I want to run some OpenRewrite receipes against it

Previously there was this page that described how I could do that (it was there a week ago):
https://docs.openrewrite.org/running-recipes/running-rewrite-without-build-tool-plugins

That page is gone now. Can I run OpenRewrite recipes against an ant build?

[timtebeek]

Hi @paulbarr ; I see you also asked this on StackOverflow; let me copy the answer I gave there here as well.

We've recently removed that page as it had not been updated since the moved to Rewrite 8. We now recommend folks to use the Moderne CLI when using neither Maven nor Gradle.

Ant is not supported officially, but I know of at least two community members who got recipe runs to work for Ant. Feel free to join our Slack and I'll try to put you in touch there. I don't know how far they got in terms of resolving dependencies, as I didn't yet see any outcome shared there.

Also, just this past week, we had a community member wire up projects built with headless Eclipse; he might also have some insights to share with you regarding how to get things running on Rewrite 8.

Hope that helps!

[timtebeek]

If you get this working for Ant, might I ask that you share your learnings (or even code) here? This request comes up from time to time, and would be really good to have a place to reference, even if we don't yet officially support Ant for now.

[paulbarr]

Hey, Thanks for coming back to me. Any chance you could send me the content of the old page? I want to try a few different things to see if I can get it working Cheers, PB

…

______________________________________________ Paul Barry, Architect, IBM Transformation Advisor Slack: @paulbarr Email: ***@***.*** To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with

________________________________ From: Tim te Beek ***@***.***> Sent: Friday, November 17, 2023 1:21 PM To: openrewrite/rewrite-docs ***@***.***> Cc: PAUL BARRY ***@***.***>; Mention ***@***.***> Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [openrewrite/rewrite-docs] Page describing how to run OpenRewrite reciepes against non gradle/maven build is gone (Issue #247) Hi @paulbarr ; I see you also asked this on StackOverflow; let me copy the answer I gave there here as well. We've recently removed that page as it had not been updated since the moved to Rewrite 8. We now recommend folks to use the Moderne ZjQcmQRYFpfptBannerStart This Message Is From an External Sender This message came from outside your organization. <https://us-phishalarm-ewt.proofpoint.com/EWT/v1/PjiDSg!2I-qKrTUgvMyUm6TUiKtxAfkm1qeyNIldr1ljbqapVVgtE_0IyUUTuighf_cRalrUvNV-3ZS1iLgdSvsz7Rtx9-FtS0nwMaUBT3klvjy4RPXx9U$> Report Suspicious ZjQcmQRYFpfptBannerEnd Hi @paulbarr<https://github.com/paulbarr> ; I see you also asked this on StackOverflow<https://stackoverflow.com/questions/77501642/where-are-the-instructions-for-running-openrewrite-receipes-when-my-build-is-not>; let me copy the answer I gave there here as well. We've recently removed that page as it had not been updated since the moved to Rewrite 8. We now recommend<#244 (comment)> folks to use the Moderne CLI<https://docs.moderne.io/user-documentation/getting-started/cli-intro> when using neither Maven nor Gradle. Ant is not supported officially, but I know of at least two community members who got recipe runs to work for Ant. Feel free to join our Slack<https://join.slack.com/t/rewriteoss/shared_invite/zt-nj42n3ea-b%7E62rIHzb3Vo0E1APKCXEA> and I'll try to put you in touch there. I don't know how far they got in terms of resolving dependencies, as I didn't yet see any outcome shared there. Also, just this past week, we had a community member wire up projects built with headless Eclipse; he might also have some insights to share with you regarding how to get things running on Rewrite 8. Hope that helps! — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub<#247 (comment)>, or unsubscribe<https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AD677TUZYZHJ3WW4VSCUYKDYE5QEHAVCNFSM6AAAAAA7PZCHGGVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMYTQMJWGQYTQMRYG4>. You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[timtebeek]

Sure; it was removed in this PR, so you can see the latest version up there still.

• https://github.com/openrewrite/rewrite-docs/pull/245/files

Here's a deep link to our Slack for that Eclipse project implementation. Some notes copied from there:

perhaps it helps to see how we create the LargeSourceSet in the Maven plugin
we had quite some changes going from Rewrite 7 to Rewrite 8; the LargeSourceSet changes are part of that
we haven't documented the internal changes that were required at the time, but perhaps it helps to see what we changed in the Maven plugin back then
you can see that for instance here you can run a recipe to get a list of results

        List<SourceFile> poms = mp.parse(Collections.singleton(project.getFile().toPath()), baseDir, ctx).collect(Collectors.toList());
        List<Result> results = recipe.run(new InMemoryLargeSourceSet(poms), ctx).getChangeset().getAllResults();

[timtebeek]

These days we recommend using the built in support for Ant in Gradle; and then run the regular Gradle plugin we already offer.
Using a minimal Gradle build file that invokes ant ought to be enough to get you going, even if you discard the Gradle build again.

[geoghegk]

Hello @timtebeek
I was interested to see your recent update on this issue recommending to leverage the Gradle Ant support and creating minimal Gradle build files.
I was playing with doing a similar thing - but using maven instead of Gradle - i.e. creating minimal maven build files. Gradle has better Ant support - but if you have an Ant application, and you are happy to keep building it using Ant, then you can use the minimal maven infrastructure just for running the recipes. i.e build the application using ant, and then run the recipes at the validation maven lifecycle phase. This approach seems to work OK in some initial testing. I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on that approach, and if you see any advantages to using Gradle versus Maven for this (apart form better Ant support). Setting up the minimal build infrastructure be it Maven or Gradle gets harder for large multi module applications. If we want it to do the build in addition to just running the recipes, its harder again (even with Gradle Ant support - although I admit I have not tried it out yet). Thanks a lot.

[timtebeek]

Hi @geoghegk ; If you've managed to get recipes to run with Maven (or Gradle) then that's great; Feel free to share your approach as it might be helpful to others still, and perhaps we can turn that into a documentation page based on your input. Thanks again!

[geoghegk]

Hi @timtebeek Thanks for getting back. I'll out line exactly what I have tried here. Appreciate your thoughts. In particular if there are obvious ways this approach can fail - to date I have only tested on fairly simple small multi module projects.

I had a look at using Gradle. Using the ant support in Gradle is nice - it gives a quick way to build the application using gradle, however, I could not get the recipes to function with just the minimal build.gradle that wraps ant. I figure the root cause is that gradle cannot "see" the ant application dependencies. I was hoping that wrapping ant with Gradle might give a very convenient way to handle the dependencies, but it seems like I have the same issue around the dependencies as I have in maven.

Here is my approach with Maven (assuming a multi-module application):

To be clear, this is not an ant to maven migration, it is just the minimal maven infrastructure required to run the recipes using the orw maven plugin)

1. Create a root pom.xml that defines the submodules. No other configuration:

  <groupId>com.example</groupId>
  <artifactId>my-app</artifactId>
  <version>1.0.0</version>
  <packaging>pom</packaging>
  <modules>
    <module>module-web</module>
    <module>module-ear</module>
    <module>module-ejb</module>
  </modules>

2. Extract the class path of each submodule in the ant application (either manually inspecting the classpath in the javac task in the build.xml, or its easy enough to automate that using org.apache.ant.ant Java library)

3. Create a minimal pom.xml for each submodule. The only thing I add to these pom.xmls are the dependencies. For each jar from the class path that was extracted in step 2, add a <dependency> element

• The jars may not include a version in the name, and we wont have the groupId or artifactId. Just use placeholder values for these - base the group and artifact Ids on the jar file name, and add a nominal version

• For each Jar, then install it to the local .m2 cache using mvn install:install-file.... ensuring the group, artifact and version MATCH EXACTLY the nominal values used in the dependency elements in the pom.xml

--OR-- As an alternative to installing the dependencies in the local .m2, you could use the deprecated maven SYSTEM scope

• Build the application using the ant infrastructure. This is important so that interdependent module dependencies are built and resolvable before the recipes are run. Also, I would never recommend to apply recipes to code that doesn't compile.

• Run the recipes - I'm generally running from command line, but you could add the recipe config to the pom.xml also. The command I am using is:

mvn validate org.openrewrite.maven:rewrite-maven-plugin:6.2.0:runNoFork \
-Dorg.slf4j.simpleLogger.defaultLogLevel=info \
-Dmaven.repo.local=<some-location>/.m2 \
-Drewrite.activeRecipes=MyActiveRecipe \
-Drewrite.configLocation=<some-location>/rewrite-test.yml \
-Drewrite.recipeArtifactCoordinates=org.openrewrite.recipe:rewrite-migrate-java:3.3.0,<more dependencies>

I am running this at the validate stage - i.e. before compilation. This is important as it means we don't need to worry about the minimal maven infrastructure being able to compile/build the application - we are still using ant for that.