In the case you want to call ivy as a standalone program (outside from ant), you have to put commons-cli 1.0 and its dependencies in your classpath. Then here is how to call it: <code> java org.apache.ivy.Main -? </code> It will indicate you what can be given as argument. <span class="since">since 1.3</span> System properties are included as ivy variables, so you can easily define an ivy variable like this: <code> java -Dmyivyvar=myvalue org.apache.ivy.Main [parameters] </code> <h1>Examples</h1> <code> java org.apache.ivy.Main </code> calls ivy with default configuration using ivy.xml in the current dir <hr/> <code> java org.apache.ivy.Main -conf path/to/myivysettings.xml -ivy path/to/myivy.xml </code> calls ivy with given ivysettings file using given ivy file <hr/> <span class="since">since 1.3</span> <code> java org.apache.ivy.Main -conf path/to/myivysettings.xml -dependency apache commons-lang 2.0 </code> calls ivy with given ivysettings file and resolve apache commons-lang 2.0. This is equivalent to: <code> java org.apache.ivy.Main -conf path/to/myivysettings.xml -ivy ivy.xml </code> with ivy.xml like this: <code type="xml"> <ivy-module version="1.0"> <info organisation="org" module="standalone" revision="working" /> <dependencies> <dependency org="apache" name="commons-lang" rev="2.0" conf="default->*"/> </dependencies> </ivy-module> </code> <hr/> <span class="since">since 1.3</span> <code> java org.apache.ivy.Main -conf path/to/myivysettings.xml -ivy path/to/myivy.xml -cachepath mycachefile.txt </code> calls ivy with given ivysettings file and resolve the dependencies found in the given ivy file, and then output the classpath of resolved artifacts in cache in a file. This file can then be used to define a classpath corresponding to all the resolved dependencies for any java program. <hr/> <span class="since">since 1.4</span> <code> java org.apache.ivy.Main -conf path/to/myivysettings.xml -dependency bar foo 2.0 -main org.bar.foo.FooMain </code> calls ivy with given ivysettings file and resolve bar foo 2.0, and then run org.foo.FooMain class with the resolved artifacts as classpath