Question

Just as a preface, sorry if I am missing something obvious. I am mainly a PHP/Python programmer but am doing server config for a friend’s startup.

I only have left to install Apache Ant on my friend’s Linux VPS server (he wants to compile Android apps on server- just a note I have already somehow manged to get the JDK and LAMP that would also be necessary).

When I did some digging on how to get Ant, this was all I got that really met my needs: http://ant.apache.org/manual/install.html#jpackage

Can someone give me some kind of push on what to do at all? Maybe a wget with the appropriate link? Anything at all is appreciated.

Thanks in advance to all.

Answer 1

Did you search for the package apache-ant in your RPM database?

If you’re not using your RPM for installing packages (and why wouldn’t you), you can download Ant directly from Apache. (Note that there are directions for JPackage RPMs too. Just in case you change your mind about not using RPMs.

Ant is a Java program, so you must have a Java JDK installed (Ant will run under the JRE, but you couldn’t build Java apps with that), and make sure that the java command is in your Path. However, that also means that there is no special version of the Ant binary for each platform, so it’s much easier to install.

Download and extract the Ant archive to a suitable directory (/opt or /usr/local or /usr/lib or whatever standard you’re using). Inside the archive, when unpacked, will be a bin directory. Those files under bin are mainly shell scripts (the ones that end with *.bat are Windows Batch files, you can ignore those). Just execute those.

I like to symbolically link those files under Apache-Ant’s bin directory to a similar name under /usr/local/bin directory. That way, you don’t need to put /usr/local/apache-ant-1.8.3/bin in your $PATH.

And that’s really about it.