Using Eclipse ant plugin from command line?

Question

I know this is not a smart question.

I need to use ant from command line and there is Ant plugin in Eclipse, so I have tried to specify ANT_HOME in Eclipse to be set to the directory of that plugin.

C:\Users\Nikolay>ant
'ant' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

Should I install a separate Ant from Apache to enable Ant from command line?

Answer 1

Probably the best solution is to install ant, but you can use the binaries that are from Eclipse too. You will find the binaries under eclipse\plugins\org.apache.ant_1.8.2.v20120109-1030. Note that the plugin the version may be different on your machine. Something like:

${eclipse_location}\plugins\org.apache.ant_1.8.2.v20120109-1030\bin\ant

should work. But this should be used only for solving something quick, until you can install ant. Since you will upgrade your Eclipse/plugins and the paths will change and you will need to keep updating your environment variables this way.