Start-Up, Shutdown or Restart the Tomcat Server Using an Ant build.xml

Following Ant build script can be used to start, stop or restart your Tomcat server. First you should set the property "tomcat.home" to your Tomcat home directory. Then when you just execute the "ant" command, it will restart your running server.
Here are all the commands you can use with this script.

Start Up:    "ant tomcat-start"
Shutdown:  "ant tomcat-stop"
Restart:      "ant" or "ant tomcat-restart"

Depending on the web application you are running, you may be getting an Out of Memory PermGen space error. If so, remove the comment marks and enable jvm argument <jvmarg value="-XX:MaxPermSize=256m"/> in the script (line 16).

How to Install Apache Ant

Its really simple.
1. Make sure you have java environment installed in your system.
2. Download Ant binary distribution form here.
3. Uncompress the file downloaded.
4. Set the environment variables.

         Click new button to add new environment variable. Type "ANT_HOME" as the variable name and give the path of the directory where you uncompress Ant as the value. Then edit the path variable. For Windows add %ANT_HOME%/bin and for Linux add ${ANT_HOME}/bin to the value value of the path variable. At the end the value of the path variable should be shown like this. C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_22\bin ; %ANT_HOME%/bin.

5. Click OK and save all the changes.

Now your are ready to use Apache Ant.

You can make sure that Ant is installed correctly by executing the command 

ant -version in command prompt. If it is installed correctly it should show the version information of Ant distribution. 

Apache Ant - Java-Based Build Tool

                 

                  Apache Ant is a powerful Java-based build tool which automates the building process of a project. Mainly Ant is used to build Java applications. But It supports many program application like C, C++, Python etc. Ant can be used to many purposes. If we want to get the results of several programs which is written and executed in different languages we can use ant to do that.
                 We can configure Ant project by using "build.xml". "build.xml" is normal xml file. There we can define all the tasks, properties and variable which are used in the build process. Ant has lost of free defined tasks. Also We can define our own task.
                  After preparing the build.xml file we can simply execute "ant" command in command prompt of terminal. Then it builds the project.
                  Ant support both Windows and Linux platforms. You cant download the binary distribution of Ant form here. For more information you can refer the Apache Ant Project Site.
I hope to bring you series of post about Apache Ant.