Administering MobileFirst applications through Ant

You can administer MobileFirst applications through the wladm Ant task.

Comparison with other facilities

You can execute administration operations with IBM MobileFirst™ Platform Foundation in the following ways:
  • The MobileFirst Operations Console, which is interactive.
  • The wladm Ant task.
  • The wladm program.
  • The MobileFirst administration REST services.
The wladm Ant task, wladm program, and REST services are useful for automated or unattended execution of operations, such as eliminating operator errors in repetitive operations or operating outside the operator's normal working hours.

The wladm Ant task and the wladm program are simpler to use and have better error reporting than the REST services. The advantage of the wladm Ant task over the wladm program is that it is platform independent and easier to integrate when integration with Ant is already available.

Prerequisites

Apache Ant is required to run the wladm task. For information about the minimum supported version of Ant, see System requirements.
For convenience, Apache Ant 1.8.4 is included in MobileFirst Server. In the product_install_dir/shortcuts/ directory, the following scripts are provided.
  • ant for UNIX / Linux
  • ant.bat for Windows
These scripts are ready to run, which means that they do not require specific environment variables. If the environment variable JAVA_HOME is set, the scripts accept it.
You can use the wladm Ant task on a different computer than the one on which you installed MobileFirst Server.
  • Copy the file product_install_dir/WorklightServer/worklight-ant-deployer.jar to the computer.
  • Make sure that a supported version of Apache Ant and a Java™ runtime environment are installed on the computer.
To use the wladm Ant task, add this initialization command to the Ant script:
<taskdef resource="com/worklight/ant/deployers/antlib.xml">
  <classpath>
    <pathelement location="product_install_dir/WorklightServer/worklight-ant-deployer.jar"/>
  </classpath>
</taskdef>
Other initialization commands that refer to the same worklight-ant-deployer.jar file are redundant because the initialization by defaults.properties is also implicitly done by antlib.xml. Here is one example of a redundant initialization command:
<taskdef resource="com/worklight/ant/defaults.properties">
  <classpath>
    <pathelement location="product_install_dir/WorklightServer/worklight-ant-deployer.jar"/>
  </classpath>
</taskdef>
Parent topic: Administering MobileFirst applications