Hey folks, I'm trying to migrate a legacy ant project to gradle which has a few custom

ant

tasks that are available in

$ANT_HOME

. I'm importing

build.xml

via

ant.importBuild("build.xml")

. However, none of the custom ant tasks are available and the build fails because they're not defined. I've read "Using custom Ant tasks", but it sounds like that only applies if I want to run the ant tasks directly from gradle, but I really just want them available in ant so that the import succeeds. Would anyone have any pointers?

ANT_HOME

is irrelevant, as Gradle ships its own Ant built-in. I don't know whether you can add it similarly though, never tried. The

importBuild

is in my eyes more a crutch or very short term work-around. 🤷‍♂️

It also doesn’t take much to fork Ant from Gradle, roughly like this:

val antConfig = configurations.create("ant")

dependencies {
  antConfig("org.apache.ant:ant-launcher:1.10.15")
  antConfig("whatever:extra-libs:you-need")
}

tasks.register("runAnt", JavaExec::class) {
  classpath = antConfig
  args("-buildfile", "myfile", "-Dmyprop=myvalue")
  mainClass = "org.apache.tools.ant.launch.Launcher"
}

(you could also use something like

antConfig(fileTree(System.getenv("ANT_HOME")) { include("lib/**") })

for Ant classpath instead but that makes it more system-dependent)