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For up-to-date product documentation, see the IBM MobileFirst Foundation Developer Center.


Administering MobileFirst applications through Ant

We can administer MobileFirst applications through the mfpadm Ant task.


Comparison with other facilities

We can execute administration operations with IBM MobileFirst™ Platform Foundation in the following ways:

The mfpadm Ant task, mfpadm program, and REST services are useful for automated or unattended execution of operations, such as:

The mfpadm Ant task and the mfpadm program are simpler to use and have better error reporting than the REST services. The advantage of the mfpadm Ant task over the mfpadm program is that it is platform independent and easier to integrate when integration with Ant is already available.


Prerequisites

The mfpadm tool is installed with the MobileFirst Server installer. In the rest of this page, product_install_dir indicates the installation directory of the MobileFirst Server installer. Apache Ant is required to run the mfpadm task. For information about the minimum supported version of Ant, see System requirements.

For convenience, Apache Ant 1.9.4 is included in MobileFirst Server. In the product_install_dir/shortcuts/ directory, the following scripts are provided.

These scripts are ready to run, which means that they do not require specific environment variables. If the environment variable JAVA_HOME is set, the scripts accept it.

We can use the mfpadm Ant task on a different computer than the one on which you installed MobileFirst Server.

To use the mfpadm Ant task, add this initialization command to the Ant script:

Other initialization commands that refer to the same mfp-ant-deployer.jar file are redundant because the initialization by defaults.properties is also implicitly done by antlib.xml. Here is one example of a redundant initialization command:

For more information about running the MobileFirst Server installer, see Run IBM® Installation Manager.

Parent topic: Administering MobileFirst applications