Lazy Automation: Ant Meets Autohotkey

Thursday 26 March 2009 - Filed under Code

Ok. I’m lazy. Really lazy.

Today I got tired of having to click around in Eclipse to run my Ant tasks  and decided to automate it with a shortcut in Autohotkey:

!r::
Run, %comspec% /c ant -f D:\CFProjects\cares\extensions\ant\avrs.db.build.xml cleanlocal
return

Lets break this down:

• So the !r:: simply tells Autohotkey to assign this shortcut to Alt+R.
• Run, %comspec% /c is a shortcut to cmd.exe.
• Then I simply pass the path of my Ant script and the task I want run (cleanlocal).

This script simply resets my database data back to a know state and I run this frequently when developing.  So now a quick Alt+R and I’m done!

2009-03-26  »  Jim Priest