IntelliJ IDEA
 
Get IntelliJ IDEA
You are viewing the documentation for an earlier version of IntelliJ IDEA.

Getting started with Ant

Last modified: 23 August 2023

Ant is a flexible and platform-independent build tool from the Apache Ant Project. IntelliJ IDEA integrates with Ant to provide a comprehensive build process that includes compilation, packaging with the documentation and source code, committing to version control, and so on.

You can create a new project, or if you have an exising project, import it.

If you created a new project or imported an existing project without Ant, you need to create an Ant Build file to use Ant as the build tool in your project.

Ant works with the XML build file. Normally, the name of the build file is build.xml. The build file describes the steps, or build targets, required to build a project. The root element of the build file is <project>. IntelliJ IDEA makes it possible to work with existing build files, create new build files from scratch, or generate them automatically.