Ant needs tools.jar and unable to find it

Question

I am putting together a dev environment for a Java program and after the first try of my Ant build scripts I got this error:

Unable to locate tools.jar. Expected         


        

Answer 1

Even if you have jdk installed, you'll need to redirect JAVA_HOME to point to it.

Here's one weird trick you can put into your .profile to set JAVA HOME properly, no matter which java you have:

export JAVA_HOME=$(dirname $(dirname $(readlink -e /usr/bin/java)))
# Test for jdk installed above jre
if [ -x $JAVA_HOME/../bin/java ]; then export JAVA_HOME=$(dirname $JAVA_HOME); fi

Answer 2

apt install defalut-jdk # this doesn't contain some file, like tools.jar...
apt install openjdk-8-jdk # this contains all files.

Answer 3

It's there on my machine. I'm running Sun JDK 1.6.0_21 on Windows XP SP3.

Are you sure you have the JDK? Is it possible that you only have the JRE?

Answer 4

Note: On CentOS / RHEL installing java-1.x.0-openjdk will not be enough. Also install java-1.x.0-openjdk-devel.

Answer 5

On Ubuntu I've just need to install JDK sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jdk

..and you can always search for all available versions with

$ sudo apt-cache search openjdk | grep ^openjdk

From the website https://openjdk.java.net/install/ we can read

The openjdk-7-jre package contains just the Java Runtime Environment. If you want to develop Java programs then install the openjdk-7-jdk package.

Answer 6

On Ubuntu I've fixed this problem by installing package

openjdk-7-jre-lib

tools.jar appeared after that.

(I know this is an old post, but comment in hope that it will be helpful for somebody lurking for answer like I was today.)