OpenGeo Client SDK set up for Windows 7 - what is ant path?

Question

I am relatively new at this and so these questions may seem a little basic to most. I have installed the OpenGeo Suite which includes the Client SDK on Windows 7. I have also installed JDK6.

But I am not sure how to proceed with the following:

"This machine also requires Apache Ant installed and on the path. To verify this, type ant -version at a terminal prompt." What is meant by 'on the path'? And do I install Apache Ant binary or Source?

"The instructions below assume that you have added the bin directory of the Client SDK to your system path. This will allow you to run the suite-sdk command from anywhere on your file system." What exactly is meant by system path?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

Answer 1

Your ANT_HOME is the path to Apache Ant, it is a build tool, (think GNU Make for Java). Ant builds the projects created by the SDK.

If you don't already, you will want to set a JAVA_HOME environmental variable pointing to where you have your Java Development Kit installed. You will also want to append %JAVA_HOME%/bin to your PATH.

Download Apache Ant (http://ant.apache.org) and unarchive it in a directory. That directory should be set to ANT_HOME. If you append %ANT_HOME%/bin to your path. You can do the Same with the OpenGeo Client SDK. You can create an environmental variable (say, OPENGEOCLIENT_SDK) pointing to where you compressed the SDK and append %OPENGEOCLIENT_SDK to you path as well.

Once you do these, running suite-sdk /help should return something like this:

Usage: suite-sdk <command> <args>

List of commands:
    create      Create a new application.
    debug       Run an existing application in debug mode.
    deploy      Deploy an application to a remote OpenGeo Suite instance.

See 'suite-sdk <command> --help' for more detail on a specific command.

HTH, DA

Answer 2

PATH refers an environment variable that contains directories that windows will look in for commands. If you start a command prompt and type:

echo "%PATH%"

you will see what they are.

You can update the PATH environment variable in a number of ways. This site has a list of steps for Windows 7:

http://www.java.com/en/download/help/path.xml

Once you install apache ant update the PATH and add the ant bin directory to the path. Follow the same steps to add the OpenGeo sdk bin directory. It is located under C:\Program Files\OpenGeo\OpenGeo Suite\sdk\bin.

Once the path is updated restart your command prompt and you can verify the PATH is set properly by typing the following commands.

ant suite-sdk

If you don't get an error message saying the command can't be found the PATH is configured correctly.