Hi, there.
Generally, you should ask for help with Ant on the Ant Users List. I've
cced the list on this email so that others can offer you their help. If
you don't want to join the mailing list, you can follow any replies
through the web archive[1].
Before I answer your specific questions, I should note that Ant is not a
turnkey program intended for typical end users. It is a utility that is
used by technically savvy users to automate tasks such as building
software from source code or testing that software works as designed. If
that describes your situation, then we will be glad to help you come up
to speed. If you are just looking for an end user program, though, you
may want to ask yourself why you want to use Ant in the first place.
Still reading? Ok, then. I'm assuming you are running on Windows. So far
as I know, Ant is not available individually bundled into a Windows
installer file. The Ant project releases the Ant program bundled into a
ZIP file, a .tar.gz file and a .tar.bz2 file. The latter two are
primarily for Unix systems, the ZIP file primarily for installing on a
Windows machine. You have to extract the contents of the ZIP file to
some directory on your hard drive before you can use it.
Ant is often bundled with other programs such as IDEs, and some of these
have windows installers. You may want to get an installer that gives you
Ant as a side effect of installing the other program. Whether you go
this route will depend on what specifically you want to do with Ant.
Assuming you still want to install Ant itself, you should note that Ant
by itself has no graphical user interface (although there are projects
that add one[2]). Instead, you have to call Ant from a command line
window. In order to be able to do that, you have to set up the command
shell environment so that the command shell can find where you installed
both Ant and Java. That is what the manual is instructing you to do when
it talks about setting the PATH variable and the JAVA_HOME variable, and
unfortunately it is a step you will have to do yourself. Here is a
reference to Microsoft's documentation on how to do that for Windows XP
Professional[3].
And to answer your question, you do not need "Apache" (by which you mean
the Apache HTTP Server) installed to use Ant. They are completely
separate save that the Apache Software Foundation is the organization
that develops both of them.
I hope that helps.
[1] http://marc.info/?l=ant-user&r=1&w=2
[2] http://antelope.tigris.org/
[3]
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/environment_variables.mspx?mfr=true
T. T. Klugh wrote:
Hi Bruce,
I found your email at the Ant site.
I recently downloaded Ant, but don't see any "Install" icon anywhere.
Do I need Apache in order for Ant to work?
Re: Instructions like setting Bin in Path and this in that makes no
sense to me.
Isn't there another way to get Ant working?
Any help is appreciated,
Thomas T. Klugh
New York City
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