Ant - Environment Setup

Apache Ant Ant is distributed under the Apache Software License, a fully-fledged open source license certified by the open source initiative.

The latest Apache Ant version, including its full-source code, class files, and documentation can be found at http://ant.apache.org.

Installing Apache Ant

It is assumed that you have already downloaded and installed Java Development Kit (JDK) on your computer. If not, please follow the instructions here.

• Ensure that the JAVA_HOME environment variable is set to the folder where your JDK is installed.
• Download the binaries from http://ant.apache.org
• Unzip the zip file to a convenient location c:\folder. using Winzip, winRAR, 7-zip or similar tools.
• Create a new environment variable called ANT_HOME that points to the Ant installation folder, in this case c:\apache-ant-1.8.2-bin folder.
• Append the path to the Apache Ant batch file to the PATH environment variable. In our case this would be the c:\apache-ant-1.8.2-bin\bin folder.

Verifying Apache Ant Installation

To verify the successful installation of Apache Ant on your computer, type ant on your command prompt.
You should see an output similar to:

C:\>ant -version
Apache Ant(TM) version 1.8.2 compiled on December 20 2010

If you do not see the above output, then please verify that you have followed the installation steps properly.

Installing Eclipse

This tutorial also covers integration of Ant with Eclipse IDE. Hence, if you have not installed Eclipse already, please download and install Eclipse
To install Eclipse:

• Download the latest Eclipse binaries from www.eclipse.org
• Unzip the Eclipse binaries to a convenient location, say c:\folder
• Run Eclipse from c:\eclipse\eclipse.exe