Automate the Plug-In Build Process

Apache Ant is used by the scripts in the SDK to generate plug-in project templates and to build plug-ins.

You can set up Apache Ant in your development environment to generate plug-in project templates and build plug-ins out of the projects. You can also build the samples provided with the vSphere Client SDK.

To use the SDK build scripts inside Eclipse, you can use the Apache Ant version provided with the Eclipse package. The following procedure sets up Apache Ant for running scripts by using the command line console.

Prerequisites

Verify that you have a Java environment installed on your development machine. See Set Up for Java Development.

Procedure

1. From the Apache Ant site at http://ant.apache.org/bindownload.cgi, download the Apache Ant binary distribution.
   For developing HTML plug-ins, download Apache Ant 1.9.x.
2. Install Apache Ant by following the provided instructions for the operating system of your development machine.
3. Set the ANT_HOME environment variable to the directory on your development machine where you installed Apache Ant.