Unzip the downloaded file to the directory of your choice.

Create an environment variable called ANT_HOME pointing to the Ant installation directory. You can do this by adding the following line to your .bashrc file (substituting with the actual location of the ant directory on your system):

export ANT_HOME=/home/user/apache-ant-1.7.0

On Windows you do this by opening the Control Panel from the Start Menu, switching it to classic view if necessary, then opening System/Advanced/Environment Variables. Create a new variable, call it ANT_HOME and set it to be the ant directory.

Add $ANT_HOME/bin to the system path to be able to run ant from the command line. You can do this by adding the following line to your .bashrc file:

export PATH=$PATH:$ANT_HOME/bin

On Windows you do this by opening the Control Panel from the Start Menu, switching it to classic view if necessary, then editing the PATH environment variable found in System/Advanced/Environment Variables/System Variables/Path. Add a semicolon and the path to the ant bin directory.

Verify your Ant installation. To do this type ant -version at the command prompt. Your output should look something like this:

Apache Ant version 1.7.0 compiled on December 13 2006