Setting Environmental Variables to configure ANT,JAVA and TOMCAT

Question

Recently I have been trying to make changes so I can do builds through Ant and the command line. This has forced me to reconfigure my setup. In order to make java available on the class path I typed the following in the command propmt...

set JAVA_HOME=C:\Java\JDK 1.6.0_08

that being the directory of my java installation. Then I will set my ANT_HOME variable to the following

set ANT_HOME=C:\Ant

I can check both of these following doing this by doing

javac

and

ant

on the command line and getting the usual output signifying that they are being read.Following this I will set them both on the

path

by doing the following

set PATH=%PATH%;%JAVA_HOME%\bin;%ANT_HOME%\bin

After doing this I check the command line for each of them and they will work fine.

The problem that I am having is that randomly, I will go back and do the same command, and it will tell me that

"ant" is not recognized as an internal or external command...

I know this is the message you get when you type an incorrect command. Why is is that every website, tutorial and book I look at for configuring these services tells me to do the same process and none of them are working? Am I completely missing something?

Answer 1

If you're on Windows remember that any changes that are made in a command window only endure until the window is closed.

Go to My Computer --> Properties --> Advanced --> Environment Variables and configure your variables here instead.

After that, close your command line window and open it again... Windows should now be able to recognize your commands.

Regards.

Answer 2

Setting environment variables in a console will only set them for the current process. So when you close the console, or run a different console, you will lose your changes.

Make sure you aren't doing that, and make sure something else you are running isn't changing the system path.

I would suggest creating a start-up script for your build that contains the environment settings. I create one named "ant.bat" at the root of my build tree. This way it doesn't matter if the environment is set, you can always find a bat file in the current directory. It will take care of setting the environment and calling ant.

Something like this:

set JAVA_HOME=C:\Java\JDK 1.6.0_08
set ANT_HOME=C:\Ant

set PATH=%PATH%;%JAVA_HOME%\bin;%ANT_HOME%\bin

call %ANT_HOME%\bin\ant %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9

This also has the advantage of documenting the environment needed for the build.