The fact that IntelliJ is off-the-shelf ready to work with Ant is a great, great feature. It's also simple to configure and use.
Assuming that you already know how to use Ant, and you have a build.xml
file ready to go, just follow these steps to (a) configure your build script to run from within IntelliJ, and (b) run Ant:
- Assuming you're in an IntelliJ project, select 6: Ant Build from the slide-in menu bar ("Tool Window Bar") on the right side of your screen.
- Click the large plus sign icon to add your
build.xml
file to IntelliJ's list of known build scripts for this project. - Navigate the filesystem until you find your build script (i.e., your
build.xml
file for this project). Select that file. - To run a desired Ant task, double-click the task name that you want to run. My main task is usually named
deploy
, so I double-click that. - Ant should run properly for you, and deploy your application.
It's really that simple.
The worst problem I've run into so far is that when I work on projects on multiple computer systems, my build scripts rely on an environment parameter named ANT_HOST_NAME
existing. So, when my build script failed the first time, I said "Oh, dummy Al, you need to set your ANT_HOST_NAME
environment parameter. Once I did this and restarted IntelliJ, the Ant build process worked like a champ.
Kudos, dear IntelliJ developers. Great product feature!