Ant building tool

Standard version

Ant can be installed via command

Custom version

If this does not install the version we need, it is possible to install manually from the tarball installation file.

1. Download the newest Ant binary distribution from their homepage http://ant.apache.org; pick the  ".tar.gz" file. At the time of the writing it is apache-ant-1.7.0-bin.tar.gz 

2. Unzip this installation, and copy the directory "apache-ant-1.7.0" to /usr/share:

   su - root
   cd /home/student/downloads
   tar xzf apache-ant-1.7.0-bin.tar.gz
   mv apache-ant-1.7.0 /usr/share/
   rm apache-ant-1.7.0-bin.tar

3. Find out, if the symlink "ant" points to anything:

   which ant
   # assume, it gives the reply "/usr/bin/ant"
   ant -version
   # if this is the newest, e.g. 1.7, then stop here
   ls -al /usr/bin/ant
   # list symlink's target
   rm /usr/bin/ant
   # delete the symlink
   ln -s /usr/share/apache-ant-1.7.0/bin/ant /usr/bin/ant
   # define a new value for it

   If you discover no symlink, then run just the last line.

4. Find out the Ant's version now:

   ant -version

   The version should switch to (at least) 1.7.0.

Ant custom tasks

You may need to configure Ant further in order to use custom tasks.

1. In order to use FTP task (see http://ant.apache.org/manual/install.html):
   1. Get Jakarta ORO package from http://jakarta.apache.org/oro/
   2. Get Commons NET package from http://commons.apache.org/downloads/index.html
   3. Copy JAR files found in these packages to "/usr/share/apache-ant-1.7.0/lib" (it is convenient to use Midnight Commander (mc) to extract needed JARs from larger packages and copy them).