After getting my new Mac, I started using Ant as usual without thinking much of it, until it occurred to me that I never installed, it was there already! Shame the default installation is flawed.

OS X Leopard default Ant installation

Under OS X Leopard, Ant sits at /usr/share/ant/. Whatever, the ant core tasks seem to run ok, it doesn’t make any difference to me. But when I tried to run an optional task, namely the ant FTP task, I got an error message:

Problem: failed to create task or type ftp
Cause: the class org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.optional.net.FTP was not found.
This looks like one of Ant's optional components.
Action: Check that the appropriate optional JAR exists in
-/usr/share/ant/lib
~/.ant/lib
-a directory added on the command line with the -lib argument

Do not panic, this is a common problem.
The commonest cause is a missing JAR.

This is not a bug; it is a configuration problem
That’s when I remembered I hadn’t actually installed Ant myself, so it wouldn’t be set up as I expected.

Installing the Ant FTP task

No big deal, I did the normal thing, i.e. looked up which libraries are needed by Ant, which turned out to be two, Jakarta ORO and Jakarta Commons Net. So I downloaded the latest version of the commons-net package, which at the time of writing is 2.0, extracted it, and copied all the *.jar files to the ant directory:

sudo cp ~/Downloads/commons-net-2.0/*.jar /usr/share/ant/lib

Then did the same again with the ORO library.

After that I run the task again, and… no joy, same error message again. The libraries were there, and yet Ant could not find them.

Re-install Ant on Leopard

To make a long story short, there is something wrong with the Ant installation OS X Leopard came with, the easiest solution is to download the latest version of Ant, and re-install it. It makes sense anyway, as at the time of writing Ant is already one sub-version higher (1.7.1 instead of 1.7.0).

Installing Ant is easy, it is just a matter of copying some .jar files and a bunch of scripts to the /usr/share/ant/ directory.
sudo cp ~/Downloads/apache-ant-1.7.1/bin/* /usr/share/ant/bin
sudo cp ~/Downloads/apache-ant-1.7.1/lib/* /usr/share/ant/lib

I typed the password as required, and was good to go. And this time, everything worked as expected.