Question

I am running an Ant script that is part of a tutorial at http://maestric.com/doc/java/spring/setup

The error is:

BUILD FAILED
Target “buildtests” does not exist in the project “null”.

I am running Ant through eclipse.

The Ant script is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project basedir="." default="build">

  <property file="build.properties"/>
  <property name="src.dir" value="src"/>
  <property name="build.dir" value="classes"/>

  <path id="build.classpath">
      <fileset dir="lib">
          <include name="*.jar"/>
      </fileset>
      <fileset dir="${appserver.lib}"> <!-- servlet API classes: -->
          <include name="servlet*.jar"/>
      </fileset>
      <pathelement path="${build.dir}"/>
  </path>  

  <target name="build">
      <mkdir dir="${build.dir}"/>
      <javac destdir="${build.dir}" source="1.5" target="1.5" debug="true"     deprecation="false" optimize="false" failonerror="true">
          <src path="${src.dir}"/>
      <classpath refid="build.classpath"/>
      </javac>
  </target>

  <target name="clean" description="Clean output directories">
      <delete>
          <fileset dir="${build.dir}">
              <include name="**/*.class"/>
          </fileset>
          </delete>
  </target>

</project>

I often have such problems with Ant, when it seems an error is caused by something that has never been declared in my script.

Answer 1

This sounds bizarre. Did you get Ant from Apache? Are there any build.xml files nearby with “buildtests” in them? Is this on a unix-based OS? If so, find the Ant script by doing a “which” and then examine its contents to see if it is trying to invoke some other build file.