How do I set the Eclipse build path and class path from an Ant build file?

Question

There\'s a lot of discussion about Ant and Eclipse, but no previously answered seems to help me.

Here\'s the deal: I am trying to build a Java program that compiles succ

Answer 1

I've never found a really clean way to do it, but one "hackish" way to do it is to manipulate the .classpath file eclipse uses (this contains the build path).

So the .classpath is going to have stuff in it like this:

So you could, for example, write some sort of batch script, etc. which would read your ant file dependencies and put them into the eclipse .classpath file (in the proper format, of course).

But personally, I never fool with such things. What I do is just put all the jars my project needs in one folder, and then in my ant file I have a path set up like this:

test_reflib just needs to be defined to wherever this folder is that contains all the jars.

Then, on the eclipse side you can just do a "Add jars" and navigate to this same folder and just pick all the jars. What's even cooler is that any time you drop new jars into this folder, just click at the root level in the eclipse project and do "Refresh", and then edit the build path and click add jar again and it will only show you the jars that you haven't already added to the build path yet (i.e. the new jar you just dropped into the folder).

This obviously doesn't work too well if you are sharing jars in a central place, but it works pretty well for smaller projects where you can just copy all the jars over to a centralized folder for the project.