Workflow automation: Makefile vs. Ant

Whenever I notice that something in my workflow is a repeating task, I try to automate it.

For example the steps necessary to deploy something on a server. It's often a build, followed by a scp and finally some remote setup scripts:

1. mvn package
2. scp target/foobar.jar server:
3. ssh server install-foobar
4. ssh server './bin/foobar restart'

I tend to write a small Makefile in such cases, which could look like

  deploy:
      mvn package
      scp target/foobar.jar server:
      ssh server install-foobar
      ssh server './bin/foobar restart'

How do you automate your workflows?
Is Ant the tool of choice? What are the Pros/Cons?

From stackoverflow

• Rake is my choice.

• For Java development, I'd say Ant is the default choice.

  Pro:

  • good documentation,
  • good IDE integration
  • Lots of third-party extensions and tools

  Con:

  • Somewhat verbose (well, it's yet anothr XML format)
  • Some things that should be simple aren't (e.g. any kind of looping)

  I don't really have any experience using makefiles, so I can't say how they compare. Maybe you should simply use what your developers are more experienced with.

  Adam Peck : ant-contrib can be used to easily add loops to ant scripts.

• I find Ant and its XML configuration syntax a bit unwieldy and there are some things that should be trivial but are very hard to get in Ant. I prefer for that kind of automation SCons.

  There is another tool precisely made to deploy stuff that I used for a bit and was pretty cool, but I forgot its name, maybe somebody else remembers it :).

• SCons is another good one. And Capistrano seems to be well regarded although I haven't tried it.

• I use shell and perl scripts

• consider GAnt (http://gant.codehaus.org/). using Groovy's builder, it is much less verbose than an Ant build script

  PEZ : Ey, this look fantastic!

• I use scripts (shell, perl, python) or makefiles. I do not like Ant and SCons

• For python I tend to use fabric for the deployment steps and setuptools for any building that is needed (not that usual for me :-)

  Fabric understands how to copy files to servers, runing commands on the remote server (both as the standard user and as root).