Installing Apache Ant

December 03, 2010 by Sandeep Bhardwaj | Tags: Ant

Apache Ant is a Java-based build tool.

Download Ant

Download Apache ANT from this URL. http://ant.apache.org/bindownload.cgi

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  
   |  
   +--- Extra directories  

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

Setup

The ant.bat script makes use of three environment variables –

1. ANT_HOME,
2. CLASSPATH (optional not required )and
3. JAVA_HOME.

Assume Ant is installed in c:\ apache-ant-1.8.1. The following sets up the environment:

set ANT_HOME=c:\apache-ant-1.8.1  
set JAVA_HOME=C:\jdk1.6.0_20  
set PATH=%PATH%;%ANT_HOME%\bin 

Check Installation

You can check the basic installation with opening a command prompt and typing

C:\>ant -version  
Apache Ant version 1.8.1 compiled on April  30 2010