Headless Building with APT in Eclipse

Instructions for building workspaces from the command-line directly or with ant

The APT plugin can be used in conjunction with Eclipse to build your preconfigured workspace, either directly from the command-line or via ant with its built-in ant task.

Building from the command-line

Given an installation of Eclipse with the APT plugin installed, you can invoke the command-line builder with the following command (with no line breaks):
java -cp %ECLIPSE_HOME%/startup.jar org.eclipse.core.launcher.Main
   -noupdate -application org.eclipse.jdt.apt.core.aptBuild -data %WORKSPACE%
This invokes Eclipse in headless mode and builds the workspace as provided on the command-line. Any configuration for the provided workspace will be observed in the build.

Building with Ant

Again, you will need an installation of Eclipse with the APT plugin installed. Given this, the "apt" task can be invoked with the following xml in your build.xml file:
<project name="test_eclipse" default="build" basedir=".">

    <taskdef name="apt" classname="org.eclipse.jdt.apt.core.build.JdtApt"/>
    
    <target name="build">
        <apt workspace="%WORKSPACE%" eclipseHome="%ECLIPSE_HOME%"/>
    </target>
    
</project>
You will need to add the jar for APT to your ant installation's lib directory, or place it on the classpath when invoking ant. The jar lives in
%ECLIPSE_HOME%/plugins/org.eclipse.jdt.apt.core_X/aptcore.jar