Built In Properties In Phing

Aside from assigning and using your own properties Phing also comes with a set of built in properties that can be used to find out all sorts of information regarding the system that Phing is run on.

As an example, let's say you wanted to found out the operating system that phing is being run on. In this case you would use the variable host.os, which on a Windows XP system would print out WINNT.

There are a lot of different properties available, so I have included the table from the phing website at the bottom of this post as a reference. However, there is one special variable called env that needs further explanation. The env variable references any environment variables that have been set. For example, if you set an environment variable using the following shell command (on UNIX based systems only).

export TESTVAR=mytestvar

You can now reference this in your build.xml file by using the following.

${env.TESTVAR}

Here is a table of the built in properties available.

This list can also be found on the Phing website.

I have found that even though some of variables specifically say "not available on Windows" most of them will produce some sort of output, even on Windows machines. Here is a test build.xml file that you can use to see what the different variables print out on your system.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!-- build xml -->
<project name="myProject" default="main">
 
 <target name="main">
  <echo>application.startdir ${application.startdir}</echo>
  <echo>host.arch ${host.arch}</echo>
  <echo>host.domain ${host.domain}</echo>
  <echo>host.fstype ${host.fstype}</echo>
  <echo>host.name ${host.name}</echo>
  <echo>host.os ${host.os}</echo>
  <echo>host.os.release ${host.os.release}</echo>
  <echo>host.os.version ${host.os.version}</echo>
  <echo>line.separator ${line.separator}</echo>
  <echo>os.name ${os.name}</echo>
  <echo>phing.file ${phing.file}</echo>
  <echo>phing.home ${phing.home}</echo>
  <echo>phing.version ${phing.version}</echo>
  <echo>phing.project.name ${phing.project.name}</echo>
  <echo>php.classpath${php.classpath}</echo>
  <echo>php.version ${php.version}</echo>
  <echo>project.basedir ${project.basedir}</echo>
  <echo>user.home ${user.home}</echo>
 </target>
</project>

This file misses out the env property as this is a custom property.

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