A task
is a piece of PHP code that can be executed. This code
implements a particular action to perform (i.e. install a file). Therefore it must
be defined in the buildfile so that it is actually invoked by Phing.
These references will be resolved before the task is executed.
Tasks have a common structure:
<name attribute1="value1" attribute2="value2" ... />
where name
is the name of the task,
attributeN
is the attribute name, and
valueN
is the value for this attribute.
There is a set of core tasks (see Core tasks) along with a number of optional tasks. It is also very easy to write your own tasks (see Extending Phing).
Tasks can be assigned an id
attribute:
<taskname id="taskID" ... />
By doing this you can refer to specific tasks later on in the code of other tasks.