How do you unwar a .war file with ant on windows?

Question

I'm only remotely familiar with what ant does, but apparently I have to setup a service that's run on jboss and put it into a deploy directory...

the problem is the .war file -- I only have winzip 7zip and ant and I dont know how to ge the contentsa out of the .war file to put it in the deploy directory...

are there other conf and build.xml files a well that are needed?

thanks for your help!

//edit

the problem is the instructions say to unwar the .war file. And I Dont know how to do this via JBOSS or any other means. How?

//edit

7zip unwar-ed the file but I'm not sure where to put the contents in jboss.

/server/ ?

Thanks for your help. As this is my first time doing this I'm completely clueless.

Answer 1

Using unzip task: http://ant.apache.org/manual/CoreTasks/unzip.html

Answer 2

Usually you can just place the WAR file into the directory and the container will take care of unpacking it.

But, a WAR file is simply a ZIP file with a different extension, so you could also use any popular unzip tool (WinZip, WinRAR, 7Zip, etc) to unzip it manually if need be.

Ant has a unzip task as well.

Answer 3

JBoss should be able to deploy a war file and unpack it on it's own. You shouldn't be writing scripts that unpack war files for JBoss.

Answer 4

Unless you have something else in mind¹, you don't have to depoy you war in an "exploded" format (i.e. unpacked). Just deploy you war on JBoss and JBoss will deal with it. To do so, just copy your war into /server/default/deploy.

¹ The only good reason I can see to deploy a war in an exploded format is if you plan to make incremental changes to the content (e.g. changing just a class) without deploying the whole webapp again. But this doesn't seem to be the case. So just deploy you war without unpacking it.