Copy to restricted folder with Ant (using Eclipse in Ubuntu)

Question

Using Eclipse in Ubuntu Linux.

I'm creating an ant task to delete a directory in my apache localhost directory (/var/www) and then copy in files from my Eclipse project.

I have:

<project>
 <target name="deploy">
  <delete dir="/var/www/gds"/>
  <copy todir="/var/www/gds/src">
   <fileset dir="src">
   </fileset>
  </copy>
  <copy todir="/var/www/gds/">
   <fileset dir="web">
   </fileset>
  </copy>
 </target>
</project>

However ant doesn't appear to have root user privileges to copy into this directory. It works if I open Eclipse using 'sudo Eclipse' but I don't really want to be running Eclipse in root.

Is there a way I can get ant to copy into this directory?

Answer 1

You could create an entry for the user you run Eclipse as in the /etc/sudoers file (using visudo or your sudo permissions editor of choice) to allow ant to run as root without a password. You would need to then get Eclipse to invoke "sudo ant" instead of just "ant" - I'm not familiar with Eclipse so maybe someone else can suggest if that's possible or not. Failing that you could wrap the ant binary in a shell script that invokes sudo ant, and then tell Eclipse that that is the ant binary instead.

Answer 2

This isn't an ANT issue it's an file-system permission problem in ubuntu.

Everything under /var is normally root access controlled. I agree that running your build as root is not the way to go :-)

I'd suggest creating a user directory under /var/www and then read/write your build files there.

For example:

sudo mkdir /var/www/gds
sudo chown myuser:myuser /var/www/gds
chmod 755 /var/www/gds

You still won't be allowed to delete the "gds" directory (because it's parent is owned by root) but you are allowed to delete everything inside it as follows

<delete>
    <fileset dir="/var/www/gds" includes="**"/>
<delete>