Automating an install of Apache Ant

I've manually installed ANT on many servers simply by unzipping the ant files in a location and setting up the ~/.bash_profile to configure the users' path to see it.

I need to automate the setup now on servers which do not have internet connectivity.

We are using Nolio for deployment, but I don't care if the automation is done via nolio. If it can be scripted, I can easily just make Nolio call the script.
I don't think editing the users' .bash_profiles is a good way to do the automation.

So, assuming I get Ant on to the servers and unzip it, what's the best way to install it so that all users will have access to it?

Solution

You can try using pssh (parallel ssh). It's pretty awesome. Create a file with all your remote hosts, run:

pssh -h "command1 && command2 && command3"

You can use pscp to deliver scripts, then use pssh to execute them. Works very well. Alternatively, you could become a puppet master and work everything off puppet. You can do some cool stuff with it, like automating builds based on hostname convention. LAMP build? Name the host web01.blarg.awesome or whatever, setup puppet to recognize it based on a regex, then deliver the appropriate packages.

GL.