Installing ant; clearly misunderstanding JAVA_HOME

Question

I am installing ant on a Windows XP machine, and am following the instructions at Apache's manual site. It said to set JAVA_HOME, so I checked, saw there was no environment variable named JAVA_HOME, made one, and set it to "C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_19"

When I try to run ant debug, however, it tells me that JAVA_HOME is currently set to "C:\Program Files\Java\jre6"

I'm guessing JAVA_HOME isn't an environment variable. But if it isn't one, I'm at a loss as to where to start looking for it. Anybody know?

Edit: Oh yeah - it's bugging me for tools.jar as well, but I'm guessing that when I fix the JAVA_HOME issue, that will help the terminal find tools.jar as well. Or maybe I'm wrong. Thanks

Yes, once your JAVA_HOME is correct and points at a JDK, it will find tools.jar. — Joshua McKinnon
I found debugging this problem intolerable so simple put the tools.jar where Ant expected to find it. Sometime surrender is the best policy. — Tim Bender
You know what? I was considering the same thing earlier but I was afraid to try it on a work PC. Thanks for the suggestion. Works fine now. — StormShadow

ig0774 ig0774 · Accepted Answer · 2010-04-06T01:15:23

Following on Newtopian's suggestions, you can quickly confirm if that behavior is the problem by running in the terminal

C:\>set JAVA_HOME=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_19
C:\>ant debug

Also, I'm not sure if the text you entered into the JAVA_HOME environment variable is literally "C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_19", i.e., with quotes, but if so, you should remove the quote marks as they'll throw off ant.bat.

Here's the relevant bit from ant.bat

:checkJava
set _JAVACMD=%JAVACMD%

if "%JAVA_HOME%" == "" goto noJavaHome
if not exist "%JAVA_HOME%\bin\java.exe" goto noJavaHome
if "%_JAVACMD%" == "" set _JAVACMD=%JAVA_HOME%\bin\java.exe
goto checkJikes

:noJavaHome
if "%_JAVACMD%" == "" set _JAVACMD=java.exe

... omitted ...

"%_JAVACMD%" %ANT_OPTS% -classpath "%ANT_HOME%\lib\ant-launcher.jar" "-Dant.home=%ANT_HOME%" org.apache.tools.ant.launch.Launcher %ANT_ARGS% %ANT_CMD_LINE_ARGS%

If that doesn't help, could you post your debug task?

Two options to make it permanent:

Run this:

C:\>REG delete HKCU\Environment /V JAVA_HOME
C:\>REG delete HKLM\Environment /V JAVA_HOME
C:\>REG add HKCU\Environment /V JAVA_HOME /d "C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_19"

(basically, ensure you only have one JAVA_HOME set and it's correct; be sure to close and reopen the terminal after doing this)

If all else fails, the crappy batch file solution:

@echo off
set JAVA_HOME=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_19
ant %*

save as ant_wrapper.bat (or whatever) and you should be able to do ant_wrapper debug.

(Both of these solutions are untested)

Installing ant; clearly misunderstanding JAVA_HOME

2 Answers