Kelly O'Hair's Weblog (blogs.sun.com)

The pain of vcvars32.bat, and an ant solution

On Windows, and using Ant to do native compilations with Visual Studio requires certain environment variables to be set. So to be able to say "just run ant", you need to require the user to have set these properties before they start ant. The standard way to set them is with the script vcvars32.bat or vsvars32.bat. So how do you just make this work inside ant? You can't just call vcvars32.bat from your ant script, or can you?

Turns out that you can dip into a cmd.exe environment just long enough to run vcvars32.bat, print out the settings as a properties file and pop back out. As an example, see the file genVSproperties.bat. Of course, the \ characters need to be changed to /. This results in something like:

############################################################
# DO NOT EDIT: This is a generated file.
windows.vs.vsvars32.bat=C:/PROGRA~1/MICROS~2.NET//Common7/Tools/vsvars32.bat
windows.vs.VS71COMNTOOLS=C:/PROGRA~1/MICROS~2.NET//Common7/Tools/
windows.vs.DEVENVDIR=C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003/Common7/IDE
windows.vs.VCINSTALLDIR=C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003
windows.vs.VSINSTALLDIR=C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003/Common7/IDE
windows.vs.MSVCDIR=C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003/VC7
windows.vs.INCLUDE=C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003/VC7/ATLMFC/INCLUDE;C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003/VC7/INCLUDE;C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003/VC7/PlatformSDK/include/prerelease;C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003/VC7/PlatformSDK/include;C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003/SDK/v1.1/include;
windows.vs.LIB=C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003/VC7/ATLMFC/LIB;C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003/VC7/LIB;C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003/VC7/PlatformSDK/lib/prerelease;C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003/VC7/PlatformSDK/lib;C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003/SDK/v1.1/lib;
windows.vs.LIBPATH=
windows.vs.PATH=C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003/Common7/IDE;C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003/VC7/BIN;C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003/Common7/Tools;C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003/Common7/Tools/bin/prerelease;C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003/Common7/Tools/bin;C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003/SDK/v1.1/bin;C:/WINDOWS/Microsoft.NET/Framework/v1.1.4322;"C:/cygwin/bin;C:/cygwin/;c:/PROGRA~1/MICROS~2.NET/Common7/IDE;c:/PROGRA~1/MICROS~2.NET/Vc7/bin;c:/PROGRA~1/MICROS~2.NET/Common7/Tools;c:/PROGRA~1/MICROS~2.NET/Common7/Tools/Bin/prerelease;c:/PROGRA~1/MICROS~2.NET/Common7/Tools/Bin;c:/PROGRA~1/MICROS~2.NET/SDK/v1.1/bin;c:/PROGRA~1/Java/JDK16~1.0_1/bin;C:/cygwin/home/ohair/import/APACHE~1.1/bin;C:/cygwin/usr/local/bin;C:/cygwin/bin;C:/cygwin/bin;C:/cygwin/usr/X11R6/bin;C:/cygwin/usr/sbin;C:/cygwin/sbin;C:/cygwin/home/ohair/hgws/home_bin/bin;C:/cygwin/home/ohair/hgws/home_bin/bin/win32;C:/cygwin/home/ohair/bin;c:/WINDOWS/System32;c:/WINDOWS;c:/WINDOWS/System32/Wbem;C:/cygwin/lib/lapack";
############################################################

So in your ant build script you can effectively do this (on Windows only of course :^):

<target name="generate-vs-properties">
    <exec dir="." executable="cmd" output="vs.properties">
        <arg value="/q"/>
        <arg value="/c"/>
        <arg value="genVSproperties.bat"/>
    </exec>
    <replace file="vs.properties" token="\" value="/"/>
    <property file="vs.properties"/>
</target>

So now what? The last piece of the puzzle is that to need to set the environment variables when you run Visual Studio, e.g.

<property file="vs.properties"/>
<exec dir="." executable="${windows.vs.VS71COMNTOOLS}/../../Vc7/bin/cl.exe" failonerror="true">
  <env key="VS71COMNTOOLS" value="${windows.vs.VS71COMNTOOLS}"/>
  <env key="INCLUDE" value="${windows.vs.INCLUDE}"/>
  <env key="LIB" value="${windows.vs.LIB}"/>
  <env key="LIBPATH" value="${windows.vs.LIBPATH}"/>
  <env key="PATH" value="${windows.vs.PATH}"/>
  <arg line="${compile_options}"/>
</exec>

Hope this is helpful to someone.

-kto

Posted at 01:28PM Feb 16, 2009 by kto in Java  |  Comments[4]