I recently had an odd situation come up, though it’s not incredibly hard to imagine. I needed to create a staging web server, identical to production, but it should live on a different hostname (eg, staging.sherman.bz, instead of www.sherman.bz). The content should not accessible to the public, nor to search engines. This isn’t really so much a privacy or security issue as it is a convenience and customer service issue. If search engines somehow picked up on our staging site (and they would, given it’s full of SEO triggering info, google analytics scripts and the like) then our search information could become poisoned with the staging URL. Also bad would be if a customer found the staging site and posted information to the wrong place. I’ve actually seen both of these happen in the past when measures were not in place to prevent it.

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So there I was, poking around in some java / j2ee code, trying to learn how it all works. I did some testing on a Linux server and realized, something is broken. It seemed something was corrupting ALL the Jar files in WEB-INF/lib/.

A co-worker guessed that the token filtering Ant was doing might be the culprit. He was right. It seems Ant has issues with detecting whether files are binary or not, given that it uses a Reader class which runs the files through a character decoder. This is specifically a problem on Unix systems since they commonly use UTF8 character set, and in that case Ant hasn’t a clue if its looking at UTF8 text or binary data.

So, I used a trick suggested in the Ant docs:

Another trick is to change the LANG environment variable from something like “us.utf8″ to “us”.

On the Linux box, this meant we had a default character set of en_US.UTF-8 and it needed to be en_US. In this case we already had a bash shell script that runs ant, so adding a line export LANG=en_US to that script before Ant ran solved the problem.

Reference:
http://ant.apache.org/manual/CoreTasks/copy.html#encoding