How do you integrate ivy with MSbuild

Question

What approach has worked well for you combining IVY + msbuild?

Our goal is to integrate IVY into the C#/C++ build process for dependency resolution and publishing. We have tried adding it to custom tasks at the beginning and end of the build and we have tried wrapping the msbuild calls with ant+ apache-ant-dotnet.

Other options might be gradle, buildr, rake.

What do you use?

Thanks

Peter

Answer 1

Most build technologies can use libraries found in a local directory. I'd suggest using the command-line ivy program to populate this, at the start of your build:

java -jar ivy.jar -ivy ivy.xml -settings ivysettings.xml -retrieve "lib/[conf]/[artifact].[ext]"

Your dependencies are listed in a standard ivy file called ivy.xml. The protocol, location and layout of your remote repository is described in ivysettings.xml

The advantage of this approach (as opposed to switching to Gradle, etc) is that you're not trying to replace your existing build tool. Ivy is solely concerned with managing dependencies.