Installing Ant

Getting Ant

Binary Edition

The latest stable version of Ant is available from the Ant web page http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/. If you like living on the edge, you can download the latest version from http://jakarta.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://jakarta.apache.org/builds/ant/release/v1.5/src/. 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 jakarta-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

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 xmlParserAPIs.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 1.1 or later. Some tasks work better on post-1.1 systems; some tasks only work on Java 1.2 and successors. A future version of Ant -Ant 2.0- will require JDK 1.2 or later, though Ant 1.x strives to retain 1.1 compatibility.

Note: The Microsoft JVM/JDK is not adequate on its own, although the MS compiler is 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 ;-)

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

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.

Building Ant

To build Ant from source, you can either install the Ant source distribution or checkout the jakarta-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.

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.

build install    (Windows)

build.sh install    (Unix)

build install-lite    (Windows)

build.sh install-lite    (Unix)

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. 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.

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