Groovy task in ant file without explicit taskdef? - groovy

Question

Disclaimer: Ant Noob!
I'm trying to get the groovy task running in ant. Works so far:
<project>
<taskdef name="groovy"
classname="org.codehaus.groovy.ant.Groovy"
classpath="C:/Local/groovy-2.4.5/lib/groovy-ant-2.4.5.jar;C:/Local/groovy-2.4.5/lib/groovy-2.4.5.jar"/>
<echo message="Hello!"/>
<groovy>
println "Hello from Groovy!"
</groovy>
</project>
What I can't get behind (even reading this and related entries) is what I need to do to my Ant installation (Windows) to make the script run like so, without the taskdef or any other reference in my project specific build file:
<project>
<echo message="Hello!"/>
<groovy> <!-- Would be nice if I could treat this like a built-in -->
println "Hello from Groovy!"
</groovy>
</project>

Answer 1

You'll need to put all Groovy dependencies (groovy-ant.jar, groovy.jar, etc) on the classpath that is read by Ant. The easiest way is to store them under ANT_HOME/lib. Or you can pass them using the -lib option on the command line.
Then you would still have to tell Ant about the path of the antlib. You can use the antlib namespace mechanism described in the documentation page. You specify the package that contains the antlib.xml in the namespace URI, in this case org.codehaus.groovy:
<project xmlns:groovy="antlib:org.codehaus.groovy">
<echo message="Hello!"/>
<groovy:groovy>
println "Hello from Groovy!"
</groovy:groovy>
</project>
Note that you can still use taskdef without referencing the Jar file if it is placed (with its dependencies) in ANT_HOME/lib. You just reference the path of the antlib resource in the Jar. In this case you can do without the namespace URI:
<project>
<taskdef resource="org/codehaus/groovy/antlib.xml"/>
<echo message="Hello!"/>
<groovy>
println "Hello from Groovy!"
</groovy>
</project>