Andy Jarrett: Installing ANT on Windows and or Mac OS X

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Installing ANT on Windows and or Mac OS X

I'm gonna try and cover the two OS's here so be kind.

First things first, goto http://ant.apache.org/bindownload.cgi and download the appropriate archive (zip) file: apache-ant-[VERSION NUMBER HERE]-bin.zip

Then for Windows: Extract the .zip to c:\ant. From the command line set the following environment variables:

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1set ANT_HOME=c:\ant
2set JAVA_HOME=c:\jdk-1.5.0.05
3set PATH=%PATH%;%ANT_HOME%\bin

For Mac: Unpack the zip file to /usr/local/ant/. Then from the command line set the following environment variables:

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1export ANT_HOME=/usr/local/ant
2export PATH=${PATH}:${ANT_HOME}/bin

Now open up the Terminal(Mac)/Command line(Win) and just type "ANT" and hit return. You should see:

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1Buildfile: build.xml does not exist!
2Build failed

To demonstrate calling a file we're gonna create a quick build.xml. Create a new text file, enter the following bit of XML and save it as build.xml

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1<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
2<project name="myProject" default="runEcho" basedir=".">
3    <target name="runEcho">
4        
5        <echo message="Is anybody out there"/>
6    </target>
7</project>

If you are on Windows save this file to the root of c:\ and from the command line run the following

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1ant -buildfile c:\build.xml

If you are on Mac then just save this to the desktop and from the Terminal run:

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1ant -buildfile ~/desktop/build.xml

You should now see

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1Buildfile: {PATH_TO_YOU_BUILD_FILE}build.xml
2
3runEcho:
4[echo] Is anybody out there
5
6BUILD SUCCESSFUL
7Total time: 0 seconds

That's pretty much it, from here you you are now set to run Ant from the Terminal/Command line so in theory you should be able to schedule tasks etc!

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Related Blog Entries

Ant: Copying files and directories (June 24, 2007)
Ant: Moving files and directories (June 24, 2007)

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Posted By Big Mad Kev @ 6/28/07 6:14 AM

Andy?............. Go celebrate mate and leave this nerdy stuff alone for a while ;)

Posted By Andy J @ 6/28/07 9:04 AM

Don't worry Kev, the alcohol hasn't stopped .. i'm just slowly building up to prepare my body for some abusive drinking come the weekend

Posted By Jim Priest @ 6/28/07 12:18 PM

If he was a real nerd he would have proposed with a build.xml file :) I'll add this to my wiki!

Posted By tony petruzzi @ 6/28/07 12:59 PM

In my nerd days, I once asked my girlfriend on a date using the Wizard from Microsoft Agent :P

http://www.microsoft.com/msagent/default.asp

Posted By Big Mad Kev @ 6/28/07 1:04 PM

If Andy was a real nerd he wouldn't be able to approach a girl to start with ;)

Posted By Andy J @ 6/28/07 1:38 PM

I did consider building a CFC that would except her answer as a boolean and only return it to me as a true value ... no chance of unexpected bugs then

Posted By Critter @ 6/29/07 10:05 AM

Anyone know if you can pass in attributes to the build.xml file?

Posted By Andy J @ 6/29/07 10:51 AM

@Critter, easier to explain in a post :o)
http://www.andyjarrett.co.uk/andy/blog/index.cfm/2...

Posted By Critter @ 6/29/07 11:57 AM

aye.

danke

Posted By Mason Simon @ 7/7/07 7:36 AM

Here's a windows installer for Ant that I made: http://code.google.com/p/winant/
I hope it's useful, and let me know if you'd like to develop it further.

Posted By Johnny Metal @ 5/17/08 2:40 AM

Very usefull, thanks a lot!

Posted By Sriram Rajagopalan @ 5/28/09 8:38 PM

Thanks Andy for this tutorial.
Really Helped me.. someone new to ANT.
Cheers !!!
Sriram

Posted By rashmi @ 4/18/10 7:47 PM

im not able to buildfile using xml program given in this site..... can u please help me building file

Posted By suresh @ 6/25/10 2:16 PM

Hi Andy,

I have installed ant 1.8.1 on my Windows XP and set the path varieable to the bin folder of ant.
But, when i typed 'ant' in command line i am getting this error messaeg-
'ant' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

Can you please help me in this ?

Posted By Andy Jarrett @ 6/26/10 7:31 AM

@suresh I haven't been on Windows for a while. First off have you tried a reboot and checked that the variable paths were saved?

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