Automatic addoninstall (Hybris 5.1) - sap-commerce-cloud

Question

We're using addon support to extend ycommercewebservices. It's cool and convenient feature, however we've got a problem - we need to execute ant task addoninstall on every machine to add our addon dependency to ycommercewebservices template:
ant addoninstall -Daddonnames="someAddon" -DaddonStorefront.ycommercewebservices="ycommercewebservices"
What is the best way to automate this process?

Answer 1

You should not be building from ycommercewebservices every time. This is a template extension, hence starting with 'y'.
Generate a new extension from ycommercewebservices using extgen. Add your addons to the new extension. Commit this new extension to your repo. Never touch the templates directly.
So there should never be a need to automate this.
But its just an ant task. How hard is that to automate?

Answer 2

I hit this same issue and created an ant build callback to automatically install a list of addons.
Add the following lines to the _before_build macro in the buildcallbacks.xml of the extension to which you want the addon(s) installed:
<!--
We have included installing the relevant addons as a build callback so that each developer does not need to insatll them manually.
The Hybris installer script cannot be used as it resets the environment configuration (local.properties) every time it runs.
-->
<echo message="Installing the following addons: ${EXTENSION_NAME.requiredAddons}" />
<var name="addonnames" value="${EXTENSION_NAME.requiredAddons}" />
<var name="storefrontTemplates" value="yacceleratorstorefront" />
<var name="addonStorefront.${storefrontTemplates}" value="EXTENSION_NAME" />
<addoninstall />
<!--
This regex replace removes the additional blank lines that the addoninstall macro adds each time it is called.
It stops the extensioninfo.xml file continuously growing.
-->
<replaceregexp file="${ext.EXTENSION_NAME.path}/extensioninfo.xml"
match="\n{3,}"
replace="${line.separator}${line.separator}"
flags="g"
byline="false" />
You will need to replace all occurrences of EXTENSION_NAME with the real name of your extension.
You will also need to add a new property to the project.properties of your extension EXTENSION_NAME.requiredAddons which will have a comma-separated list of the addons you wish to have installed.
Using this macro, the addons will be re-installed on every build, which should be fine. I personally don't recommend that you commit the files where they are installed - instead commit the addon itself and install it on every build.
Hope this works for you.

Answer 3

Purpose of addon is to plug it in any standard hybris store.
Consider you are using git in development of all extension and addon. Now once you install addon on any extension. That extension's extensioninfo.xml file is modified. Hence if you installed addon on one machine you can commit this file(extension's extensioninfo.xml). It will be reflected in every machine which share this GIT codebase.