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antbuildbuild-process

When should you mess with Ant Buildfiles?

On large team projects, I've needed to manually edit the Ant Buildfile. On small programs I've written from scratch, I haven't needed to make or edit any sort of helper files for the build (e.g. never written a Buildfile for Hello World"). So my questions are:

  1. On those smaller projects, how is the program ever being built?
  2. What kinds of projects will build automatically, and what kinds of projects require a Buildfile that needs to be manually edited?
Solution

  • No project built with Ant will ever build automatically without creating a build file.

    Ant doesn't do anything without a build file.

    Maybe your IDE generates one for you, or maybe you're not even using Ant to build your small project.