I then looked to the Ant wiki and much to my surprise there were no MySQL specific entries!

After a bit of Googling and tinkering however I’ve come up with a script that does simple dump/restore functions and should provide the basics for someone to expand on if they need more.

The script is available on my wiki: http://thecrumb.com/wiki/ant/database

One interesting thing I ran into that had me stumped for an afternoon was defining my user/password as properties and passing them into my script.

I usually define all my properties in external files.  In this example I had the following defined:

• db.local.username = myusername
• db.local.password = password

And was using it like:

<exec executable="${path.mysql}/mysqldump" input="dbscripts/@{filename}">
<arg value="--user=${db.@{server}.username}"/>
<arg value="--password=${db.@{server}.password}"/>
<arg value="--host=${db.@{server}}"/>
<arg value="--port=3306"/>
<arg value="@{database}"/>
</exec>

When I ran this it bombed and I got a MySQL error.  I initially thought it was a MySQL permission error so I tested it via the command line and everything worked.

OK.

Then I swapped out the property values in my Ant script with hard coded values:

<exec executable="${path.mysql}/mysqldump" input="dbscripts/@{filename}">
<arg value="--user=root"/>
<arg value="--password=password"/>
<arg value="--host=${db.@{server}}"/>
<arg value="--port=3306"/>
<arg value="@{database}"/>
</exec>

I expected that to fail as well but it worked!  Weird.  I then tried all sorts of various combinations.  Eventually I tried using property names that did NOT include ‘username‘ and ‘password‘.

• db.local.un = myusername
• db.local.pw = mypassword

<exec executable="${path.mysql}/mysqldump" input="dbscripts/@{filename}">
<arg value="--user=${<strong>db.@{server}.un</strong>}"/>
<arg value="--password=${<strong>db.@{server}.pw</strong>}"/>
<arg value="--host=${db.@{server}}"/>
<arg value="--port=3306"/>
<arg value="@{database}"/>
</exec>

And that worked! Even when defined in an external property file.

I have no idea if ‘username‘ and ‘password‘ are some sort of reserved word.  I tried it in both Ant 1.7 and  1.8 with the same results.

The scripts on the wiki work in my environment  (Ant 1.7, Windows XP and MySQL 5.1.x) .

If you modify the scripts and do something interesting with them – please let me know!

And if you blow something up – please don’t blame me!

Today Sun announced they are acquiring MySQL! Not many details yet but… wow.