Apache Ant Build Tool

Apache ANT is a Java build automation tool. ANT stands for Another Neat Tool. The main use case of the Ant tool is to build Java applications. We can download the tool from the official website link.

Ant Official Website Link: 

• https://ant.apache.org/

Install

Install steps for popular operating systems:

Windows 10: https://www.testingdocs.com/download-and-install-ant-on-windows/

Ubuntu: https://www.testingdocs.com/install-ant-tool-on-ubuntu-linux/

build.xml

The default Ant build file is an XML file called build.xml. The build file has  a <project> tag. The project tag can have multiple <target> tags.

Project tag

<project name=”TDocsProject” default=”all” basedir=”.”>

Target tag

Sample target for compiling Java classes. The target name is build.

<!– Compile Java Files  –>
<target name=”build” >
<javac srcdir=”${src}” destdir=”${classdir}” includes=”**/*.java” includeantruntime=”false” classpathref=”build.classpath”/>
</target>

Dependencies

We can specify dependencies for the targets in the build file. We can use the attribute depends= to specify the dependencies. For example

<target name=”jar” depends=”build”>

Here the jar target depends on successful build target.

Properties

We can use variables in the build.xml.

<property name=”classdir” value=”${dirs.base}/bin”/>
<property name=”src” value=”${dirs.base}/src”/>
<property name=”lib” value=”${dirs.base}/lib”/>

The property value can be references using the ${}. For example to reference the src file path we can use,

${src}