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But I'm hoping it can read them from java properties

<@U053HNE90>: you can create a `.properties` file:
  &lt;properties file="${root.dir}/build.properties" override="false"/&gt;

We have that in our ivysettings.xml, (but we don't set any)

But for example `jvm_options += ['-Divy.cache.dir={}'.format(self._ivy_cache_dir)]`

I think you are right, I think they can be system properties.

Just for reference, I'm setting up our ivysettings.xml so the resolution and cache dirs are always explicitly plumbed

All of this comes from ant so, I'm guessing it works the same.

```    if self._ivy_cache_dir and '-cache' not in args:
      # TODO(John Sirois): Currently this is a magic property to support hand-crafted &lt;caches/&gt; in
      # ivysettings.xml.  Ideally we'd support either simple -caches or these hand-crafted cases
      # instead of just hand-crafted.  Clean this up by taking over ivysettings.xml and generating
      # it from BUILD constructs.
      jvm_options += ['-Divy.cache.dir={}'.format(self._ivy_cache_dir)]```

I can't find `-cache` being passed anywhere in the pants codebase

Is this a thing that people do, or is it legacy?

<@U053HNE90>: hm. i think if we'd know that existed, we'd have used it. we currently have alternate configs

ie, `pants-support/ivy/ci.ivysettings.xml` (which uses an environment variable to place the cache) vs `pants-support/ivy/ivysettings.xml`

Yeah that's sort of what I'm fighting now, except that it doesn't work for integration tests because the environment variable is wrong (the integration test runs in a temp directory)

So at this point I'm just plumbing the resolution and cache dirs all the way through the subsystem into the ivy call

```  &lt;caches
    repositoryCacheDir="${ivy.cache.repository.dir}"
    resolutionCacheDir="${ivy.cache.resolution.dir}"
    lockStrategy="artifact-lock-nio"
  /&gt;
```

```    jvm_options += ['-Divy.cache.repository.dir={}'.format(self._ivy_cache_dir)]
    jvm_options += ['-Divy.cache.resolution.dir={}'.format(self._ivy_resolution_dir)]
```

<@U053HNE90>: oh, i think i might see what happened... that probably used to be read as an environment variable that was required to be set in your ivysettings.xml

at some point pants switched to the 'default' ivysettings.xml

...and then back, since we re-grew dependencies on 3rdparty repos

so we could read that variable in pants' ivysettings.xml with a line like:

```&lt;property name="ivy.cache.dir" value="${env.ivy.cache.dir}" override="false"/&gt;```

We don't necessary have control over env variables though

Theoretically this could be run in a nailgun