Specifying an additional argument for ant or phing

Question

PHP

Question for everyone who uses ant or phing.
I want to write a script that will deploy some project to a server. At the same time, in the task launch line, I want to be able to specify a variable that will indicate in which environment I am going to deploy (test, production, etc.). I would like it to look something like this:
phing deploy test
Where deploy is the name of the task, of course, and test is a variable pointing to the environment.

My question is how can ant or phing intercept the value of the second argument (after the task name)?

Answer 1

Can I do separate tasks in the ante? How many deployment types do you have...

Answer 2

You can pass parameters to phing with -D. Doesn't look very nice - but without crutches IMHO

  <target name="test_env">
    <echo>${environment}</echo>
  </target>

[email protected]:~/***$ phing test_env -Denvironment=test1
Buildfile: ****/build.xml

**** > test_env:

     [echo] test1

BUILD FINISHED

Total time: 0.0969 seconds

Answer 3

For ant: (most cut out)

ant [options] [target [target2 [target3] ...]]
Options:
  -D<property>=<value>   use value for given property
  -propertyfile <name>   load all properties from file with -D

ant.apache.org/manual/running.html
But the individual targets are clearer, I think. Another option is to create pseudo-goals whose action will be reduced to setting the desired properties and calling the desired target.
PS When choosing between phing and ant, I stopped at the latter, because. (1) more versatile and (2) fully supported in eclipse.