Ant for eclipse - access eclipse configurations from within ant

Install

Installing ant4eclipse to Ant's lib-directories

This is the easiest way of installing ant4eclipse. Simply copy the ant4eclipse.jar and the jars from the lib-directory from the ant4eclipse distribution into the lib-directory of your ant installation. An alternative approach is to copy the jar-files to a directory called .ant/lib in your home directory. Both directories will be searched by Ant for libraries.

Using ant4eclipse from command line

Point Ant to ant4eclipse.jar and the ant4eclipse lib-directory by using Ant's "-lib" command line argument:

 ant -lib /path/to/ant4eclipse/ant4eclipse.jar -lib /path/to/ant4eclipse/libs <other ant args>

Installing ant4eclipse as an eclipse plugin

Download a copy of the ant4eclipse-plugin and unzip it to your eclipse 3.x installation. Start (or restart) eclipse. To verify your installation, select 'Windows -> preferences'. In the Treeview, select 'ant -> runtime'. The ant4eclipse-classpathentry should be listed in "Contributed Entries".

Include ant4eclipse in your build-file

After you have installed ant4eclipse, you can create a new build.xml file and declare the tasks that come with ant4eclipse using Ant's taskdef task:

Example:

			
 <project name="..." default="...">
			
   <!-- declare ant4eclipse -->
   <taskdef resource="net/sf/ant4eclipse/antlib.xml" />
			
   <!-- optional: declare experimental tasks -->
   <taskdef resource="net/sf/ant4eclipse/experimental.xml" /> 
			
   <!-- optional: declare ant-contrib -->
   <taskdef resource="net/sf/antcontrib/antlib.xml" />
			
   ...
			
 </project>

Note: the ant-contrib task are not part of the ant4eclipse distribution and have to be installed separatly. Take a look at our link-page for further information where to download the ant-contrib tasks.

Next steps

Having prepared your build file this way, you're ready to start using ant4eclipse. See a complete example