NetBeans dependent project in Hudson

While configuring a Hudson job for the single project of ours which still hadn't one I had some problems, as it is a NetBeans project that depends on other NetBeans projects. That is not a problem per se, as everything has run as smooth as silk for years on each and every developer's machine.

When run on the CI server, the build reported this error:

BUILD FAILED
C:\HudsonWorkspace\.hudson\jobs\myProject\workspace\myProjectFolder\NBProject\nbproject\build-impl.xml:558: Warning: Could not find file C:\HudsonWorkspace\.hudson\jobs\myProject\workspace\myOtherProject\dist\myOtherProject.jar to copy.

Unwilling to give up the "depend on project" feature on NetBeans (my colleagues would skin me alive), I investigated a little. Once you know where to look, everything seems quite easy, and as a matter of fact it is.

The dependency is defined, as you would expect, in the project.properties file, where you can find something like this:

project.myOtherProject=../../myOtherProject
reference.myOtherProject.jar=${project.myOtherProject}/dist/myOtherProject.jar

In practice, the first line defines where the other project is while the second defines where to find the relative jar file.

All you have to do is then override these properties in the job configuration in Hudson, either using the path relative to the build.xml file or using the absolute path of the referenced project on the Hudson server.

Now you have no more excuses... :-)