Adding A Context Menu Item For Phing On Windows

21st March 2012 - 2 minutes read time

Note: This post is over a year old and so the information contained here might be out of date. If you do spot something please leave a comment and I will endeavour to correct.

To make things a bit quicker when using Phing on Windows use the following registry entry to create a right click option that integrates with Phing.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
 
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell]
 
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\Phing]
@="Phing It!"
 
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\Phing\command]
@="cmd.exe /K phing -f \"%1\""

Save the above text into a file with a .reg file extension and run it by double clicking on it (you can also right click and select Merge). You will get a message asking if you want to add information to the registry, click "Yes" to allow the entry.

With this in place will see a menu item called "Phing it!" when you right click on a file. If you run this on a Phing build.xml file you will open a command window and run the command phing -f, passing in the filename you clicked on as the argument. This runs the build file and is a quick and easy way to run Phing tasks on your Windows environments.

This has been tested fully on Windows XP, but if you have any problems please let me know.

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