How do you create a MANIFEST.MF that's available when you're testing and running from a jar in produ
- by warvair
I've spent far too much time trying to figure this out. This should be the simplest thing and everyone who distributes Java applications in jars must have to deal with it.
I just want to know the proper way to add versioning to my Java app so that I can access the version information when I'm testing, e.g. debugging in Eclipse and running from a jar.
Here's what I have in my build.xml:
<target name="jar" depends = "compile">
<property name="version.num" value="1.0.0"/>
<buildnumber file="build.num"/>
<tstamp>
<format property="TODAY" pattern="yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss" />
</tstamp>
<manifest file="${build}/META-INF/MANIFEST.MF">
<attribute name="Built-By" value="${user.name}" />
<attribute name="Built-Date" value="${TODAY}" />
<attribute name="Implementation-Title" value="MyApp" />
<attribute name="Implementation-Vendor" value="MyCompany" />
<attribute name="Implementation-Version" value="${version.num}-b${build.number}"/>
</manifest>
<jar destfile="${build}/myapp.jar" basedir="${build}" excludes="*.jar" />
</target>
This creates /META-INF/MANIFEST.MF and I can read the values when I'm debugging in Eclipse thusly:
public MyClass()
{
try
{
InputStream stream = getClass().getResourceAsStream("/META-INF/MANIFEST.MF");
Manifest manifest = new Manifest(stream);
Attributes attributes = manifest.getMainAttributes();
String implementationTitle = attributes.getValue("Implementation-Title");
String implementationVersion = attributes.getValue("Implementation-Version");
String builtDate = attributes.getValue("Built-Date");
String builtBy = attributes.getValue("Built-By");
}
catch (IOException e)
{
logger.error("Couldn't read manifest.");
}
}
But, when I create the jar file, it loads the manifest of another jar (presumably the first jar loaded by the application - in my case, activation.jar).
Also, the following code doesn't work either although all the proper values are in the manifest file.
Package thisPackage = getClass().getPackage();
String implementationVersion = thisPackage.getImplementationVersion();
Any ideas?
