Frequently Asked Questions

AntDepo is a flexible distributed automation harness that enables you to break complex management processes down into reusable generic commands. Each node hosting applications or where management processes must be executed has the AntDepo software installed. The AntDepo framework manages dependencies between commands and allows you to assemble fine-grained commands into more complex procedures that can be executed across machines.

AntDepo uses Ant as a runtime. AntDepo introduces a command abstraction over Ant buildfiles and provides a command dispatching framework that looks up named commands and executes the Ant buildfiles that act as the command implementations. The current version of AntDepo includes a distribution of Ant 1.6.5.

One can also consider AntDepo as an operations wrapper for configuration and build processes developed by engineering. Existing Ant build files can be exposed as named commands to application support staff. Wrapped as commands, build files benefit from the AntDepo normalized command line syntax which can include user defined command line options.

You don't need to know how to code in Ant to use AntDepo. You can create AntDepo commands using several different shell script languages. AntDepo can take command definitions and generate Ant buildfiles for the command handlers.

ControlTier uses the AntDepo framework as its client layer. Both software projects are developed and supported by the ControlTier Software company.

Currently, AntDepo has been tested on most Linux, Solaris and Windows. It should work wherever Ant can run.

AntDepo uses SSH for remote execution. That means an SSH server must be running on the machines which require remote execution. To support remote commands, a common user account and appropriate ssh configuration is required on the manager and client machines. The remote commands assume that ssh does not prompt for user input such as a pass phrase or machine key verification.

AntDepo has been tested with J2SE 1.4.x. Verify that a full Java runtime is installed on the target systems. Type java -version at a command prompt; if a version message does not appear, then either a JDK needs to be installed or the path is not setup correctly. Also, be sure JAVA_HOME has been defined correctly.

Ant provides via its -Dproperty=value command line argument a means to pass data to your build procedure but when handing off a procedure to a support person or even another developer it is preferable to have a proper command line option handler. AntDepo commands can accept command line arguments via the getopts task.