Debug Ant problems with diagnostics

By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: June 4, 2016

I just had a problem using Ant on Mac OS X 10.4.x. As I was trying to get the jarbundler task to run, the jarbundler help text said to copy the jarbundler.jar file to the /Developer/Java/Ant/lib directory. Turns out this isn't right for my system, but I didn't know where Ant was getting its libraries from.

My exact error was:

taskdef class net.sourceforge.jarbundler.JarBundler cannot be found

Fortunately the following Ant command gave me all the output I needed, and much more:

ant -diagnostics

I won't bother to list all the output here, as it is extensive. Just remember to give this command a try if you're having any problems getting Ant to work with a new library or taskdef.

java

ant