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Installing Ant takes about a minute. The install script downloads the correct binary for your platform, places it on your PATH, and creates the antx convenience symlink. If you prefer manual control, you can also download the binary directly from GitHub Releases.

Quick install

1

Run the install script

Paste this command in your terminal:
curl -fsSL https://ant.themackabu.com/install | bash
The script detects your operating system and architecture, downloads the matching binary, and installs it to ~/.ant/bin/ (or alongside an existing ant installation if one is found).
2

Restart your shell or source your profile

After installation the script will tell you if it updated your PATH. If it did, either open a new terminal window or run:
source ~/.bashrc
3

Verify the installation

Confirm Ant is available:
ant --version
You should see the version string printed to stdout.

Platform support

Ant ships official binaries for the following platforms. All targets are built and tested in CI on every release.
Operating systemArchitectureVariantStatic binary
GNU/Linuxx64glibcNo
GNU/Linuxaarch64glibcNo
GNU/Linuxx64muslYes
GNU/Linuxaarch64muslYes
macOSx64darwinNo
macOSaarch64darwinNo
Windowsx64mingw/msysNo
The musl variants (Alpine Linux and other musl-based distributions) are statically linked, so they run without any dynamic library dependencies.

Platform-specific notes

The install script works on both Intel (x64) and Apple Silicon (aarch64) Macs running macOS 15 or later. If macOS Gatekeeper blocks the binary on first run, right-click the binary in Finder and choose Open, or run:
xattr -d com.apple.quarantine $(which ant)

Manual install

If you’d rather not run a remote script, download the binary for your platform directly from the GitHub Releases page, make it executable, and move it somewhere on your PATH:
chmod +x ant-linux-x64          # replace with the filename you downloaded
mv ant-linux-x64 /usr/local/bin/ant
When Ant installs, it also creates an antx symlink alongside the main binary. Invoking antx is equivalent to running ant x — it’s a shorthand for Ant’s package execution command, similar to npx in the Node ecosystem. You’ll use it to run scripts from installed packages without adding them to your PATH permanently.

Next steps

Once Ant is installed, head to the quickstart guide to run your first JavaScript and TypeScript files.