## 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.

### 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, defaults to true. 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
keepcompression | For entries coming from existing archives (like nested zipfilesets or while updating the archive), keep the compression as it has been originally instead of using the compress attribute. Defaults false. Since Ant 1.6 | No
encoding | The character encoding to use for filenames inside the archive. Defaults to UTF8. It is not recommended to change this value as the created archive will most likely be unreadable for Java otherwise. | No
filesonly | Store only file entries, defaults to false | No
includes | comma- or space-separated list of patterns of files that must be included. All files are included when omitted. | No
includesfile | the 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 files (except default excludes) are excluded when omitted. | No
excludesfile | the 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"). Default excludes are used when omitted. | No
manifest | the manifest file to use. | No
update | indicates whether to update or overwrite the destination file if it already exists. Default is "false". | No
duplicate | behavior when a duplicate file is found. Valid values are "add", "preserve", and "fail". The default value is "add". | No

### 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.

## Example

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

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