Ant-Contrib Tasks

Ant-Contrib Tasks

Contents

What’s this?

The Ant-Contrib project is a collection of tasks (and at one point maybe types and other tools) for Apache Ant.

This Software is distributed under the Apache Software License.

Installation

First you must install Apache Ant itself, most of the Ant-Contrib tasks require Ant 1.5 or higher to work properly, however, there are some tasks, specifically <for> which require Ant 1.6. You can download Ant from Apache.

Then you need the Ant-Contrib tasks themselves. As there is no release of these tasks yet, you have to build them from sources. Fortunately this is easy, check out the sources (grab the ant-contrib module from CVS), change into the source directory of ant-contrib and type ant. After Ant has completed, you’ll find ant-contrib-version.jar in the lib subdirectory.

You now have the choice:

Copy ant-contrib-version.jar to the lib directory of your Ant installation, or on your CLASSPATH environment variable. If you want to use one of the tasks in your project, add the line

<taskdef resource="net/sf/antcontrib/antlib.xml"/>

to your build file.

Keep ant-contrib-version.jar in a separate location. You now have to tell Ant explicitly where to find it (say in /usr/share/java/lib):

<taskdef resource="net/sf/antcontrib/antlib.xml">
  <classpath>
    <pathelement location="/usr/share/java/lib/ant-contrib-version.jar"/>
  </classpath>
</taskdef>

If you would like to use run with Ant Version 1.5 you must use the the .properties file instead. Keep in mind that some tasks will not be available to you , such as the task:

<taskdef resource="net/sf/antcontrib/antcontrib.properties">
  <classpath>
    <pathelement location="/usr/share/java/lib/ant-contrib-version.jar"/>
  </classpath>
</taskdef>