Does Eclipse ship ant with its own distribution?

Question

First time using Apache Ant (I'm excited and overwhelmed at the same time!) for automating a Java app.

I did not go to the ant website and download ant directly. Rather, I'm using the standard plugin that ships with Eclipse. From Eclipse, I can run test build.xml projects perfectly. But when I go to run ant directly off the command-line, Windows doesn't recognize it as a recognized command.

This leads me to believe that I either do not have ant installed, or I have not configured it properly (at all). If it's not installed, then why do these build.xml scripts work when I fire them inside of Eclipse? Does Eclipse ship with its own distrib of ant that isn't accessible from the cmd line?

And if it's just a config issue, what do I need to do in order to get ant to run a buildscript of my own flavor?

I want to start using Apache Ivy and in order to run the demos I first need ant up and running from the command line.

Thanks for any help or insight :-)

Answer 1

Does Eclipse ship with its own distrib of ant that isn't accessible from the cmd line?

Essentially, yes. Eclipse bundles the core Ant runtime plus its own extensions and integration, but it's private to the Eclipse installation.

If you want to run the builds from outside of Eclipse, you need to download and install the full distribution of Ant.