# Ant-Contrib Tasks

## Contents

- What's this?
- Installation
- Tasks

## What's this?

The Ant-Contrib project is a collection of tasks (and at one point maybe types and other tools) for Apache Ant.

This Software is distributed under the Apache Software License.

## Installation

First you must install Apache Ant itself, most of the Ant-Contrib tasks require Ant 1.5 or higher to work properly, however, there are some tasks, specifically <for> which require Ant 1.6. You can download Ant from Apache.

Then you need the Ant-Contrib tasks themselves. As there is no release of these tasks yet, you have to build them from sources. Fortunately this is easy, check out the sources (grab the `ant-contrib` module from CVS), change into the source directory of ant-contrib and type `ant`. After Ant has completed, you'll find `ant-contrib-version.jar` in the `lib` subdirectory.

You now have the choice:

1. Copy `ant-contrib-version.jar` to the `lib` directory of your Ant installation, or on your CLASSPATH environment variable. If you want to use one of the tasks in your project, add the line

       <taskdef resource="net/sf/antcontrib/antlib.xml"/>

   to your build file.
2. Keep `ant-contrib-version.jar` in a separate location. You now have to tell Ant explicitly where to find it (say in `/usr/share/java/lib`):

       <taskdef resource="net/sf/antcontrib/antlib.xml">
         <classpath>
           <pathelement location="/usr/share/java/lib/ant-contrib-version.jar"/>
         </classpath>
       </taskdef>

3. If you would like to use run with Ant Version 1.5 you must use the the .properties file instead. Keep in mind that some tasks will not be available to you , such as the <for> task:

       <taskdef resource="net/sf/antcontrib/antcontrib.properties">
         <classpath>
           <pathelement location="/usr/share/java/lib/ant-contrib-version.jar"/>
         </classpath>
       </taskdef>

   Copyright © 2002-2004 Ant-Contrib Project. All rights Reserved.