## Ear

### Description

An extension of the Jar task with special treatment for files that should end up in an Enterprise Application archive.

(The `Ear` task is a shortcut for specifying the particular layout of a EAR file. The same thing can be accomplished by using the prefix and fullpath attributes of zipfilesets in a `Zip` or `Jar` task.)

The extended zipfileset element from the `Zip` task (with attributes prefix, fullpath, and src) is available in the `Ear` task.

Please note that the zip format allows multiple files of the same fully-qualified name to exist within a single archive. This has been documented as causing various problems for unsuspecting users. If you wish to avoid this behavior you must set the duplicate attribute to a value other than its default, add.

### Parameters

Attribute | Description | Required
--- | --- | ---
destfile | the EAR file to create. | Yes
appxml | The deployment descriptor to use (`META-INF/application.xml`). | Yes, unless update is set to true
basedir | the directory from which to jar the files. | No
compress | Not only store data but also compress them. Unless you set the keepcompression attribute to false, this will apply to the entire archive, not only the files you've added while updating. | No; defaults to true
keepcompression | For entries coming from existing archives (like nested `zipfileset`s or while updating the archive), keep the compression as it has been originally instead of using the compress attribute. Since Apache Ant 1.6 | No; defaults to false
encoding | The character encoding to use for filenames inside the archive. It is not recommended to change this value as the created archive will most likely be unreadable for Java otherwise. See also the discussion in the zip task page | No; defaults to UTF8
filesonly | Store only file entries. | No; defaults to false
includes | comma- or space-separated list of patterns of files that must be included. | No; defaults to all (**)
includesfile | name of a file. Each line of this file is taken to be an include pattern. | No
excludes | comma- or space-separated list of patterns of files that must be excluded. | No; defaults to default excludes or none if defaultexcludes is no
excludesfile | name of a file. Each line of this file is taken to be an exclude pattern. | No
defaultexcludes | indicates whether default excludes should be used or not (yes|no). | No; defaults to yes
manifest | the manifest file to use. | No
filesetmanifest | behavior when a manifest file is found in a `zipfileset` or `zipgroupfileset` file. Valid values are skip, merge, and mergewithoutmain. merge will merge all of the manifests together, and merge this into any other specified manifests. mergewithoutmain merges everything but the Main section of the manifests. | No; defaults to skip
whenmanifestonly | behavior when no files match. Valid values are fail, skip, and create. | No; defaults to create
manifestencoding | The encoding used to read the JAR manifest, when a manifest file is specified. | No; defaults to default JVM character encoding
index | whether to create an index list to speed up classloading. This is a JDK 1.3+ specific feature. Unless you specify additional jars with nested `indexjars` elements, only the contents of this jar will be included in the index. | No; defaults to false

indexMetaInf

whether to include `META-INF` and its children in the index. Doesn't have any effect if index is false.
Oracle's jar implementation used to skip the `META-INF` directory and Ant followed that example. The behavior has been changed with Java 5. In order to avoid problems with Ant generated jars on Java 1.4 or earlier, Ant will not include `META-INF` unless explicitly asked to.
Since Ant 1.8.0.

No; defaults to false

update | indicates whether to update or overwrite the destination file if it already exists. | No; default is false
duplicate | behavior when a duplicate file is found. Valid values are add, preserve, and fail. | No; default is add

roundup

Whether the file modification times will be rounded up to the next even number of seconds.
Zip archives store file modification times with a granularity of 2 seconds, so the times will either be rounded up or down. If you round down, the archive will always seem out-of-date when you rerun the task, so the default is to round up. Rounding up may lead to a different type of problems like JSPs inside a web archive that seem to be slightly more recent than precompiled pages, rendering precompilation useless.
Since Ant 1.6.2

No; defaults to true

level | Non-default level at which file compression should be performed. Valid values range from 0 (no compression/fastest) to 9 (maximum compression/slowest). Since Ant 1.7 | No

preserve0permissions

when updating an archive or adding entries from a different archive Ant will assume that a Unix permissions value of 0 (nobody is allowed to do anything to the file/directory) means that the permissions haven't been stored at all rather than real permissions and will instead apply its own default values.
Set this attribute to true if you really want to preserve the original permission field. Since Ant 1.8.0

No; default is false

useLanguageEncodingFlag | Whether to set the language encoding flag if the encoding is UTF-8. This setting doesn't have any effect if the encoding is not UTF-8. Since Ant 1.8.0. See also the discussion in the zip task page | No; default is true
createUnicodeExtraFields | Whether to create Unicode extra fields to store the file names a second time inside the entry's metadata. Possible values are never, always and not-encodeable which will only add Unicode extra fields if the file name cannot be encoded using the specified encoding. Since Ant 1.8.0. See also the discussion in the zip task page | No; default is never
fallbacktoUTF8 | Whether to use UTF-8 and the language encoding flag instead of the specified encoding if a file name cannot be encoded using the specified encoding. Since Ant 1.8.0. See also the discussion in the zip task page | No; default is false

mergeClassPathAttributes

Whether to merge the `Class-Path` attributes found in different manifests (if merging manifests). If false, only the attribute of the last merged manifest will be preserved. Since Ant 1.8.0.
unless you also set flattenAttributes to true this may result in manifests containing multiple `Class-Path` attributes which violates the manifest specification.

No; default is false

flattenAttributes | Whether to merge attributes occurring more than once in a section (this can only happen for the `Class-Path` attribute) into a single attribute. Since Ant 1.8.0. | No; default is false
zip64Mode | When to use Zip64 extensions for entries. The possible values are never, always and as-needed. Since Ant 1.9.1. See also the discussion in the zip task page | No; default is never

### Parameters specified as nested elements

#### metainf

The nested `metainf` element specifies a FileSet. All files included in this fileset will end up in the `META-INF` directory of the ear file. If this fileset includes a file named `MANIFEST.MF`, the file is ignored and you will get a warning.

#### manifest, indexjars, service

These are inherited from <jar>

## Example

    <ear destfile="${build.dir}/myapp.ear" appxml="${src.dir}/metadata/application.xml">
      <fileset dir="${build.dir}" includes="*.jar,*.war"/>
    </ear>