Default Target

The default target, i.e. the target executed when no target is specified on the command line is specified by defining the target ‘default’. So for example:

target('default', 'The default target.') { aTarget() }

This assumes aTarget exists!

Rather than requiring that the above mechanism is used, Gant provides a shortcut:

setDefaultTarget aTarget

What this actually does is:

target('default': 'aTarget') { aTarget() }

The convention of using the target name as the description is for creating the string at the end of the project help output (-p, –projecthelp, -T, –targets options to Gant).

The parameter to the setDefaultTarget call can be either the name of a target or a string that evaluates to the name of a target. So for the above example we could have:

setDefaultTarget 'aTarget'

This allows great flexibility, possibly needless :-), in coding up defaults. For example:

defaultTargetName = 'aTarget'
setDefaultTarget defaultTargetName