Ivy: <ivy:settings> vs. <ivy:configure>

Question

I have a master Ivy project that others include in their project via a svn:externals property. The project contains the Ivy jar, the default ivysettings.xml file that connects to our project, and a few Ant macros that allows me to standardize the way we build jars, etc. (For example, users use <jar.macro> vs. <jar>. The <jar.macro> uses the same parameters, but also automatically embeds the pom.xml in the jar and adds in Jenkins build information into the Manifest).

We also use Jenkins as our continuous integration system. One of the things I want to do is to clean the Ivy cache for each build, so we don't have any jar issues due to cache problems. To do this, I've setup my ivysettings.xml file to define a separate cache for each Jenkins Executor:

<ivysettings>
    <property name="env.EXECUTOR_NUMBER" value="0" override="false"/>
    <caches
        defaultCacheDir="${ivy.default.ivy.user.dir}/cache-${env.EXECUTOR_NUMBER}"
        resolutionCacheDir="${ivy.dir}/../target/ivy.cache"/>
    <settings defaultResolver="default"/>
    <include file="${ivy.dir}/ivysettings-public.xml"/>
    <include url="${ivy.default.settings.dir}/ivysettings-shared.xml"/>
    <include url="${ivy.default.settings.dir}/ivysettings-local.xml"/>
    <include url="${ivy.default.settings.dir}/ivysettings-main-chain.xml"/>
    <include url="${ivy.default.settings.dir}/ivysettings-default-chain.xml"/>
</ivysettings>

I originally used the <ivy:settings> task to configure our projects with Ivy. However, all of the Jenkins executors were using the same Ivy cache which caused problems. I switched from <ivy:settings> to <ivy:configure> and the problem went away. Apparently, <ivy:configure> sets up Ivy immediately (and thus sets up the caches correctly) while <ivy:settings> doesn't set Ivy up until <ivy:resolve> is called.

I've seen some emails on Nabble about <ivy:configure> being deprecated (or maybe not). I see nothing in the Ivy online documentation stating <ivy:configure> is being deprecated.

So, when would you use <ivy:settings> vs. <ivy:configure>. In my case, since I needed separate caches for each Jenkins executor, I needed to use <ivy:configure>, but is there a reason I might use <ivy:settings> over <ivy:configure>? And, is <ivy:configure> deprecated?

Answer 1

here's what I found:

• <ivy:settings> is newer and the preferred way.
• <ivy:configure> may or may not be deprecated.
• <ivy:settings> doesn't set my Ivy settings until <ivy:resolve> is called while <ivy:configure> sets all Ivy settings as soon as the task is executed.

The last one is my issue. Since I have parallel Jenkins builds going on, and I want to start out each build with a completely clean cache, I use customized cache settings depending upon the Jenkins executor number. The caches are labeled cache-0 through cache-5.

However, since <ivy:settings> isn't executed until I call <ivy:resolve>, my customized cache settings aren't picked up. I call <ivy:cleancache> before I call Ivy resolve which causes the builds to clean out a common cache. Hilarity ensues. Using <ivy:cofnfigure> fixes this problem.