Ant needs tools.jar and unable to find it

Question

I am putting together a dev environment for a Java program and after the first try of my Ant build scripts I got this error:

Unable to locate tools.jar. Expected to find it in /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/lib/tools.jar

While the path to the jdk is correct, the tools.jar really wasn't there. Is it actually supposed to be there or did I get some config/installation thing wrong?

Canady

It looks like you have JRE-only Java installed. See openjdk.java.net/install perhaps. What OS do you have there? – Samaria

OS is Ubuntu. At first I installed only JRE then I installed JDK. They could possibly be mis-configured :) – Canady

possible duplicate of Unable to locate tools.jar – Plath

Answer 1

It's there on my machine. I'm running Sun JDK 1.6.0_21 on Windows XP SP3.

Are you sure you have the JDK? Is it possible that you only have the JRE?

Thromboembolism

I have both, jdk and jre. but that particular directory got downloaded and extracted as jdk which makes me assume it is jdk lol. – Canady

To be more specific, add this to .bashrc export JAVA_HOME=/usr/bin – Nomarchy

To be yet more specific, if you're running a build script that invokes an Ant build, you may need to actually set the export in your ~/.bashrc. I found just doing it in the terminal before running one particular build.sh didn't solve the problem. I also set export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64 rather than just /usr/; JAVA_HOME should be the install directory of the JDK, since Ant will (I think) look in JAVA_HOME/bin and JAVA_HOME/lib. – Casease

How can this be the accepted answer? It's not even an answer, per se. – Santiago

I was just thinking the smae as @HeathHunnicutt, it seems everywhere I go to find answers to this question I'm met with "you must only have JRE installed" I know I have /usr/lib/jvm/java-11-openjdk-amd64/ so wtf – Okie

Answer 2

It seems like you can have Java installed in /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk but only have the JRE, not the JDK. This fixed it for me:

sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk

Takeo

You'll also need to redirect JAVA_HOME to point to the jdk and not the jre. – Miley

Also works for java 8: sudo apt-get install openjdk-8-jdk – Delinquent

Isn't this a bug in Ubuntu then? Shouldn't the ant package depend on the JDK? – Ore

Answer 3

Note: On CentOS / RHEL installing java-1.x.0-openjdk will not be enough. Also install java-1.x.0-openjdk-devel.

Autism

thanks, I wonder why a jdk which is a java developer kit requires an extra devel package.... – Christos

Answer 4

On Debian, after installing Ant with apt-get install ant, I've encountered the same error when running it:

Unable to locate tools.jar. Expected to find it in /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk-amd64/lib/tools.jar

Indeed, there's no mention of any tools.jar anywhere in /usr/lib, although /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk-amd64 itself does exist.

---

https://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=contents&keywords=java-6-openjdk-amd64%2Flib%2Ftools.jar

As per the search above, java-6-openjdk-amd64/lib/tools.jar appears to be part of openjdk-6-jdk, which indeed didn't get installed with ant (since it's only marked as suggested (https://packages.debian.org/wheezy/ant)).

apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk

Whippoorwill

Answer 5

apt install defalut-jdk # this doesn't contain some file, like tools.jar...
apt install openjdk-8-jdk # this contains all files.

Eve

Even if your answer is really helpful I believe that it can be improved by adding some explanation. Follow the link to know more how to write a good answer – Progress

Answer 6

On Ubuntu I've just need to install JDK sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jdk

..and you can always search for all available versions with

$ sudo apt-cache search openjdk | grep ^openjdk

From the website https://openjdk.java.net/install/ we can read

The openjdk-7-jre package contains just the Java Runtime Environment. If you want to develop Java programs then install the openjdk-7-jdk package.

Washburn

Android has not yet been ported to Java 7 :/ – Choroiditis

thank you @Washburn this solved my problem. Don't know who down voted you but I upvoted your correct answer for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS . – Porshaport

Answer 7

Try the following:

% sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

% sudo update-alternatives --config java

select the option that has the path

/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/java

Worked for me on an ubuntu 10.4

u can try to put your JAVA_HOME also, as follows:

% sudo export JAVA_HOME=$(readlink -f /usr/bin/javac | sed "s:/bin/javac::")

Tribalism

Answer 8

Installing the jdk-6u45-linux-x64.bin (from the oracle.com site) via unzip does not result in a tools.jar. I guess that file is created by the "make-jpkg" script. Once I did that, and installed the resulting .deb file, everything was fine. I really hate oracle's lawyers.

Assumption

Answer 9

Even if you have jdk installed, you'll need to redirect JAVA_HOME to point to it.

Here's one weird trick you can put into your .profile to set JAVA HOME properly, no matter which java you have:

export JAVA_HOME=$(dirname $(dirname $(readlink -e /usr/bin/java)))
# Test for jdk installed above jre
if [ -x $JAVA_HOME/../bin/java ]; then export JAVA_HOME=$(dirname $JAVA_HOME); fi

Miley

Answer 10

On Ubuntu I've fixed this problem by installing package

openjdk-7-jre-lib

tools.jar appeared after that.

(I know this is an old post, but comment in hope that it will be helpful for somebody lurking for answer like I was today.)

Knudsen