TIL - where to put ant-contrib

I was testing an ant based build script change today. And I thought ant was already retired.

Running the script led to a lot of warnings about a missing library. I asked the person, if there are any dependencies for ant-contrib. His response was “yes, you need to install ant-contrib”.

First of all, I didn’t have ant installed. But that was easy with

1irichter@irichter-MacBookPro:~ brew2 install ant

Unfortunately, ant-contrib wasn’t available via homebrew, so I had to download it and place it… where? Ah, in the lib folder of your ant installation. Okay, that might one solution. I remembered, that years ago I was using it in a different way. There was another location where ant was looking for additional jars.

This worked for me

• create or locate the ~/.ant/lib directory
• copy all additional jars in this directory

From now on, ant will be able to find ant-contrib and I don’t have to mess around with the ant installation directory. Clean, nice and simple solution.

NOTE: I don’t know, if this will work on Windows in the same way.

Thanks for reading!