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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T06:25:48+00:00

I have a NetBeans project that I’m trying to compile manually from command-line ant

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I have a NetBeans project that I’m trying to compile manually from command-line ant. When running on the same machine that has NetBeans installed, it works flawlessly.

However, if I run ant on a central continuous integration server (no NetBeans installed) it fails on a <copyfiles> task:

BUILD FAILED
/var/lib/jenkins/workspace/project_name/nbproject/build-impl.xml:697: Problem: failed to create task or type copyfiles
Cause: The name is undefined.
Action: Check the spelling.
Action: Check that any custom tasks/types have been declared.
Action: Check that any <presetdef>/<macrodef> declarations have taken place.

The target is in the auto-generated build-impl.xml, which looks something like this:

<target depends="init" name="library-inclusion-in-archive" unless="dist.ear.dir">
    <copyfiles files="${file.reference.some_dependency.jar}" todir="${build.web.dir}/WEB-INF/lib"/>
</target>

When I look at the ant manual, copyfiles isn’t even a proper ant task. So what’s up?

How can I get this to run on a machine with no NetBeans installation?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Per this advice, I verified the dependencies, and indeed the lib/CopyLibs directory was not versioned in our source control repo. That’s why my local environment was able to compile, but the CI server wasn’t.

    After adding the dependency to the classpath – org-netbeans-modules-java-j2seproject-copylibstask.jar specifically – the ant build succeeded.

    On a personal note, I find it absurd that NetBeans needs an external dependency for a task that – trivially – exists as a standard ant task.

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