This post contains a few simple steps to setting up an Ant target that will deploy a Flash or Flex project ( or anything really ) to a server.
This is a useful addition to an Ant build, saving time copying files manually and preventing potential errors occurring when trying to remember which files to copy.
To begin with it is assumed that you are using Flash/Flex Builder/Eclipse and that Ant is set up for it. If you don't have Ant set up then there are plenty of good tutorials showing how to, such as this one.
The main Ant task used is the SCP task, documentation for which can be found here. This isn't included in the Ant distribution and requires the jsch library. I had problems using the latest version in Flex Builder 3 with Ant 1.7, but found version 0.1.29 to work fine. This version is available here.
To set up the jar file in Eclipse go to the Window menu and select Preferences.... Open Ant in the tree menu on the left and select Runtime. Then under the Classpath tab to the right select Global Entries and click on the Add External JARs... button. Browse to and select the jsch jar file. You should now be set to use the various jsch tasks including the SCP task.
A basic target to copy a bin folder to a folder on a server would look something like this:
<target name="deploy" >
<scp
trust="true"
password="${password}"
todir="${server.user}@${server.address}:${server.loc}">
<fileset dir="${bindir}" />
</scp>
</target>
Obviously all the variables are held in a .properties file declared earlier in the build file making the target more reusable, but you could equally hard code the values in.
If you don't want to have a password in a .properties file then you can add a dialog to the task for password entry. Ant offers the input task, but doesn't provide any way of *ing out the text entry. There are several third party tasks that offer this functionality. One good one is the query task from the JeraAntTasks library.
To use this download the jar file from the above link and add it to Ant's Global Entries in Eclipse the same way the jsch jar was added above. Then go to the Types tab and click on the Add Type... button. In the window that opens enter a name ( this is the name that you will use in your build file ), select the JeraAntTasks.jar from the location dropdown. Navigate to the anttasks package in the bottom left tree menu and select Query.class in the bottom right hand menu. Press OK.
You can now add a password dialog box to the target so it looks something like this:
<target name="deploy" >
<query name="password" password="true" />
<scp
trust="true"
password="${password}"
todir="${server.user}@${server.address}:${server.loc}">
<fileset dir="${bindir}" />
</scp>
</target>
In place of having a password variable in a .properties file, it is now declared by the query task. Remember to replace query with whatever you called it in the previous step.
This is a relatively simple target, but could be expanded to do pretty much whatever you like when combined with other build targets and other tasks, such as the SSHEXEC task for example.