Dovetailed Technologies
January 2017

Ant-SSH - extended SSH tasks for Apache Ant

These custom Ant tasks are based on the SSH tasks from Apache Ant 1.9.8 from:
      org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.optional.ssh
      
They are similar to the base Ant tasks, but add:

- Support for using an ssh-auth or PuTTY pagent key agent.
- Support for multiple known_hosts files, and PuTTY known host registry entries on Windows
- Allows for password prompts, which are masked if supported by the Ant runtime environment.
- Added an SFTP task with support for common SFTP subcommands
- The sftp, scp, and exec tasks may be nested into a single SSH session task.

See "doc/index.html" for documentation

See "test" directory for example Ant scripts.

All questions or comments should posted to the Dovetailed Technologies 
	"z/OS Community Tools" forum.
	See: "Community Forum" at http://coztoolkit.com/support.html for registration info.

IBM z/OS developers: 
	We recommend that you download the z/OS port of the "ncdu" package
	at http://coztoolkit.com/community.html, which includes a complete example
	of a project that uses these tasks for streamlined workstation IDE based
	development of a z/OS application with Ant, Co:Z SFTP, and z/OS make.

Prereqs:  
	Java 7 or later
	Apache Ant 1.80 or later

Running Ant scripts that use these tasks:

  Packaged as an "antlib", the jars in lib/*.jar need to be in the Ant classpath.
  Several options:
  
  1) Externally run ant like:
  
     ant -lib /path/to/ant-ssh/lib
     
     or: set environment variable ANT_OPTS="-lib /path/to/ant-ssh/lib"
            
  2) Under an IDE that supports Ant integration.
     Add all of the jars in the ant-ssh/lib directory to the IDE's Ant classpath
     
     Eclipse:
     Under Window/Preferences/Ant/Runtime/Global Entries, select "Add External Jars"
     
     Netbeans:
     See http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E50453_01/doc.80/e50452/build_japps.htm
     "7.2.8 Ant Classpaths and Custom Tasks"


Usage notes:
  We really like the open source "Keepass2" password safe, which supports Linux, Windows, Mac, etc.
  If you install the "keyagent" plugin, you can also keep your SSH keys in the safe and they become 
  available to ant-ssh tasks and other ssh clients on your desktop when your safe is open.
  In effect, it is a great alternative to (Unix)ssh-agent and (Windows)PuTTY pagent.
    
  See:  http://keepass.info  and http://lechnology.com/software/keeagent/