Troubleshooting Ant

Ant giving you problems? Here are a few things to check*:

• Which version of ant are you running? Other applications distribute a copy -it may be being picked up by accident.
• If a task is failing to run is optional.jar in ANT_HOME/lib? Are there any libraries which it depends on missing?
• If a task doesn't do what you expect, run ant -verbose or ant -debug to see what is happening.
• Unset CLASSPATH; if that is wrong things go horribly wrong. Ant does not need the CLASSPATH variable defined to anything to work.
• Make sure there are no versions of crimson.jar or other XML parsers in JRE/ext.

• Check your environment variables. Are ANT_HOME and JAVA_HOME correct? If they have quotes or trailing slashes, remove them.
  • To set Windows environment variables go to Control Panel > System > Advanced > Environment Variables
  • To view environment variables - go to a DOS prompt and type 'set'. You should get a list of variables. Verify ANT_HOME is there and set to the correct path.

U:\>set
ALLUSERSPROFILE=C:\Documents and Settings\All Users
ANT_HOME=D:\ant
APPDATA=C:\Documents and Settings\priestj\Application Data
APR_ICONV_PATH=C:\Program Files\Subversion\iconv
CommonProgramFiles=C:\Program Files\Common Files

• To view your path - go to a DOS prompt and type 'path'.

U:\>path
PATH=C:\ColdFusion8\verity\k2\_nti40\bin;C:\oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1\bin;C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_11;C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.0_11;C:\WINNT\system32;C:\WINNT;C:\Program Files\Subversion\bin...

• Is your path correct? Is Ant on it? What about JDK/bin? have you tested this? A createProcess error (especially with ID=2 on windows) usually means executable not found on the path.

Bits of this were taken from the Ant Feedback and Troubleshooting page.