Running ant task in maven

Sometimes you have some task that you just need to execute: without attaching to build phase, or any process - just run. Unfortunately maven is not very flexible about it. Fortunately, it is still possible. To do it, you need use antrun plugin with custom profile. For example, like this:

<profiles>
  <profile>
     <id>deploy</id>
     <build>
        <plugins>
          <plugin>
            <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>1.3</version>
            <configuration>
              <tasks>
                <property file="user.properties" prefix="user"/>
                <scp file="target/target.war" todir="${user.login}:${user.password}@${user.server}:/home/user/" trust="true"/>
                <sshexec host="${user.server}" username="${user.login}" password="${user.password}" command="sudo ./redeploy.sh" trust="true" />
              </tasks>
            </configuration>
            <dependencies>
                <dependency>
                    <groupId>org.apache.ant</groupId>
                    <artifactId>ant-jsch</artifactId>
                    <version>1.7.1</version>
                </dependency>
                <dependency>
                    <groupId>com.jcraft</groupId>
                    <artifactId>jsch</artifactId>
                    <version>0.1.42</version>
                </dependency>
            </dependencies>
          </plugin>
        </plugins>
     </build>
  </profile>
...

</profiles>

Later, you can run this script like:

mvn antrun:run -Pdeploy

Of course you can have different scripts in several profiles.

This approach even has advantages over having separate Ant's build.xml - you don't need to have separate Ant installation, or for instance, with example above, you don't need to download jsch plugin separately - it is all done by Maven.