Installing Ant

Getting Ant

Binary Edition

The latest stable version of Ant is available from the Ant web page http://ant.apache.org/. If you like living on the edge, you can download the latest version from http://cvs.apache.org/builds/ant/nightly/.

Source Edition

If you prefer the source edition, you can download the source for the latest Ant release from http://ant.apache.org/srcdownload.cgi. Again, if you prefer the edge, you can access the code as it is being developed via CVS. The Jakarta website has details on accessing CVS. Please checkout the ant module. See the section Building Ant on how to build Ant from the source code. You can also access the Ant CVS repository on-line.

System Requirements

Ant has been used successfully on many platforms, including Linux, commercial flavours of Unix such as Solaris and HP-UX, Windows 9x and NT, OS/2 Warp, Novell Netware 6 and MacOS X.

To build and use Ant, you must have a JAXP-compliant XML parser installed and available on your classpath.

The binary distribution of Ant includes the latest version of the Apache Xerces2 XML parser. Please see http://java.sun.com/xml/ for more information about JAXP. If you wish to use a different JAXP-compliant parser, you should remove xercesImpl.jar and xml-apis.jar from Ant's lib directory. You can then either put the jars from your preferred parser into Ant's lib directory or put the jars on the system classpath.

For the current version of Ant, you will also need a JDK installed on your system, version 1.2 or later.

Note: The Microsoft JVM/JDK is not supported.

Note #2: If a JDK is not present, only the JRE runtime, then many tasks will not work.

Installing Ant

The binary distribution of Ant consists of the following directory layout:

  ant
   +--- bin  // contains launcher scripts
   |
   +--- lib  // contains Ant jars plus necessary dependencies
   |
   +--- docs // contains documentation
   |      +--- ant2    // a brief description of ant2 requirements
   |      |
   |      +--- images  // various logos for html documentation
   |      |
   |      +--- manual  // Ant documentation (a must read ;-)
   |
   +--- etc // contains xsl goodies to:
            //   - create an enhanced report from xml output of various tasks.
            //   - migrate your build files and get rid of 'deprecated' warning
            //   - ... and more ;-)

Only the bin and lib directories are required to run Ant. To install Ant, choose a directory and copy the distribution file there. This directory will be known as ANT_HOME.

Windows 95, Windows 98 & Windows ME Note:

On these systems, the script used to launch Ant will have problems if ANT_HOME is a long filename (i.e. a filename which is not of the format known as "8.3"). This is due to limitations in the OS's handling of the "for" batch-file statement. It is recommended, therefore, that Ant be installed in a short, 8.3 path, such as C:\Ant.

On these systems you will also need to configure more environment space to cater for the environment variables used in the Ant lauch script. To do this, you will need to add or update the following line in the config.sys file

shell=c:\command.com c:\ /p /e:32768

Setup

Before you can run ant there is some additional set up you will need to do:

Add the bin directory to your path.
Set the ANT_HOME environment variable to the directory where you installed Ant. On some operating systems the ant wrapper scripts can guess ANT_HOME (Unix dialects and Windows NT/2000) - but it is better to not rely on this behavior.
Optionally, set the JAVA_HOME environment variable (see the Advanced section below). This should be set to the directory where your JDK is installed.

Note: Do not install Ant's ant.jar file into the lib/ext directory of the JDK/JRE. Ant is an application, whilst the extension directory is intended for JDK extensions. In particular there are security restrictions on the classes which may be loaded by an extension.

Optional Tasks

Ant supports a number of optional tasks. An optional task is a task which typically requires an external library to function. The optional tasks are packaged together with the core Ant tasks.

The external libraries required by each of the optional tasks is detailed in the Library Dependencies section. These external libraries may either be placed in Ant's lib directory, where they will be picked up automatically, or made available on the system CLASSPATH environment variable.

Windows and OS/2

Assume Ant is installed in c:\ant\. The following sets up the environment:

set ANT_HOME=c:\ant
set JAVA_HOME=c:\jdk1.2.2
set PATH=%PATH%;%ANT_HOME%\bin

Unix (bash)

Assume Ant is installed in /usr/local/ant. The following sets up the environment:

export ANT_HOME=/usr/local/ant
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/local/jdk-1.2.2
export PATH=${PATH}:${ANT_HOME}/bin

Unix (csh)

setenv ANT_HOME /usr/local/ant
setenv JAVA_HOME /usr/local/jdk-1.2.2
set path=( $path $ANT_HOME/bin )

Advanced

There are lots of variants that can be used to run Ant. What you need is at least the following:

The classpath for Ant must contain ant.jar and any jars/classes needed for your chosen JAXP-compliant XML parser.
When you need JDK functionality (such as for the javac task or the rmic task), then for JDK 1.1, the classes.zip file of the JDK must be added to the classpath; for JDK 1.2 or JDK 1.3, tools.jar must be added. The scripts supplied with Ant, in the bin directory, will add the required JDK classes automatically, if the JAVA_HOME environment variable is set.
When you are executing platform-specific applications, such as the exec task or the cvs task, the property ant.home must be set to the directory containing where you installed Ant. Again this is set by the Ant scripts to the value of the ANT_HOME environment variable.

The supplied ant shell scripts all support an ANT_OPTS environment variable which can be used to supply extra options to ant. Some of the scripts also read in an extra script stored in the users home directory, which can be used to set such options. Look at the source for your platform's invocation script for details.

Building Ant

To build Ant from source, you can either install the Ant source distribution or checkout the ant module from CVS.

Once you have installed the source, change into the installation directory.

Set the JAVA_HOME environment variable to the directory where the JDK is installed. See Installing Ant for examples on how to do this for your operating system.

Note: The bootstrap process of Ant requires a greedy compiler like Sun's javac or jikes. It does not work with gcj or kjc.

Make sure you have downloaded any auxiliary jars required to build tasks you are interested in. These should either be available on the CLASSPATH or added to the lib directory. See Library Dependencies for a list of jar requirements for various features. Note that this will make the auxiliary jars available for the building of Ant only. For running Ant you will still need to make the jars available as described under Installing Ant.

Your are now ready to build Ant:

build -Ddist.dir=<directory_to_contain_Ant_distribution> dist (Windows)

build.sh -Ddist.dir=<directory_to_contain_Ant_distribution> dist (Unix)

This will create a binary distribution of Ant in the directory you specified.

The above action does the following:

If necessary it will bootstrap the Ant code. Bootstrapping involves the manual compilation of enough Ant code to be able to run Ant. The bootstrapped Ant is used for the remainder of the build steps.
Invokes the bootstrapped Ant with the parameters passed to the build script. In this case, these parameters define an Ant property value and specify the "dist" target in Ant's own build.xml file.

On most occasions you will not need to explicitly bootstrap Ant since the build scripts do that for you. If however, the build file you are using makes use of features not yet compiled into the bootstrapped Ant, you will need to manually bootstrap. Run bootstrap.bat (Windows) or bootstrap.sh (UNIX) to build a new bootstrap version of Ant.

If you wish to install the build into the current ANT_HOME directory, you can use:

build install (Windows)

build.sh install (Unix)

You can avoid the lengthy Javadoc step, if desired, with:

build install-lite (Windows)

build.sh install-lite (Unix)

This will only install the bin and lib directories.

Both the install and install-lite targets will overwrite the current Ant version in ANT_HOME.

Library Dependencies

The following libraries are needed in your CLASSPATH or in the install directory's lib directory if you are using the indicated feature. Note that only one of the regexp libraries is needed for use with the mappers (and Java 1.4 and higher includes a regexp implementation which Ant will find automatically). You will also need to install the Ant optional jar containing the task definitions to make these tasks available. Please refer to the Installing Ant / Optional Tasks section above.

Jar Name	Needed For	Available At
An XSL transformer like Xalan or XSL:P	style task	If you use JDK 1.4, an XSL transformer is already included, so you need not do anything special. XALAN : http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/index.html XSL:P : used to live at http://www.clc-marketing.com/xslp/, but the link doesn't work any longer and we are not aware of a replacement site.
jakarta-regexp-1.3.jar	regexp type with mappers	http://jakarta.apache.org/regexp/
jakarta-oro-2.0.7.jar	regexp type with mappers and the perforce tasks To use the FTP task, you need jakarta-oro 2.0.1 or later, and commons-net	http://jakarta.apache.org/oro/
junit.jar	junit tasks	http://www.junit.org/
xalan.jar	junitreport task	http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/
stylebook.jar	stylebook task	CVS repository of http://xml.apache.org/
testlet.jar	deprecated test task	Build from the gzip compress tar archive in http://avalon.apache.org/historiccvs/testlet/
antlr.jar	antlr task	http://www.antlr.org/
bsf.jar	script task Note: Ant 1.6 and later require Apache BSF, not the IBM version. I.e. you need BSF 2.3.0-rc1 or later.	http://jakarta.apache.org/bsf/
Groovy jars	Groovy with script and scriptdef tasks You need to get the groovy jar and two asm jars from a groovy installation. The jars are groovy-[version].jar, asm-[vesion].jar and asm-util-[version].jar. As of groovy version 1.0-beta-7, the jars are groovy-1.0-beta-7.jar, asm-1.4.3.jar and asm-util-1.4.3.jar.	http://groovy.codehaus.org/ The asm jars are also available from the creators of asm - http://asm.objectweb.org/
netrexx.jar	netrexx task, Rexx with the script task	http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/netrexx/
js.jar	Javascript with script task If you use Apache BSF 2.3.0-rc1, you must use rhino 1.5R3 - later versions of BSF work with 1.5R4 as well.	http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/
jython.jar	Python with script task Warning : jython.jar also contains classes from jakarta-oro. Remove these classes if you are also using jakarta-oro.	http://jython.sourceforge.net/
jpython.jar	Python with script task deprecated, jython is the prefered engine	http://www.jpython.org/
jacl.jar and tcljava.jar	TCL with script task	http://www.scriptics.com/software/java/
BeanShell JAR(s)	BeanShell with script task. Note: Ant 1.6 and later require BeanShell version 1.3 or later	http://www.beanshell.org/
jruby.jar	Ruby with script task	http://jruby.sourceforge.net/
judo.jar	Judoscript with script task	http://www.judoscript.com/index.html
commons-logging.jar	CommonsLoggingListener	http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/logging/index.html
log4j.jar	Log4jListener	http://jakarta.apache.org/log4j/docs/index.html
commons-net.jar	ftp, rexec and telnet tasks jakarta-oro 2.0.1 or later is required in any case together with commons-net. For all users, a minimum version of commons-net of 1.2.2 is recommended. Earlier versions did not support autodetection of system type or had significant bugs.	http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/net/index.html
bcel.jar	classfileset data type, JavaClassHelper used by the ClassConstants filter reader and optionally used by ejbjar for dependency determination	http://jakarta.apache.org/bcel/
mail.jar	Mail task with Mime encoding, and the MimeMail task	http://java.sun.com/products/javamail/
jsse.jar	Support for SMTP over TLS/SSL in the Mail task Already included in jdk 1.4	http://java.sun.com/products/jsse/
activation.jar	Mail task with Mime encoding, and the MimeMail task	http://java.sun.com/products/javabeans/glasgow/jaf.html
jdepend.jar	jdepend task	http://www.clarkware.com/software/JDepend.html
resolver.jar 1.1beta or later	xmlcatalog datatype only if support for external catalog files is desired	http://xml.apache.org/commons/.
jsch.jar	sshexec and scp tasks	http://www.jcraft.com/jsch/index.html
JAI - Java Advanded Imaging	image task	http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/jai/
IContract	icontract task Warning : the icontract jar file contains also antlr classes. To make the antlr task work properly, remove antlr/ANTLRGrammarParseBehavior.class from the icontract jar file installed under $ANT_HOME/lib.	http://www.reliable-systems.com/tools/