Migrating from Ant to Gradle is very easy with the importBuild method from AntBuilder. We only have to add this single line and reference our existing Ant build XML file and all Ant tasks can now be executed as Gradle tasks. We can automatically rename the Ant tasks if we want to avoid task name collisions with Gradle task names. We use a closure argument with the importBuild method and return the new task names. The existing Ant task name is the first argument of the closure.

Let‘s first create a simple Ant build.xml file:

The build file contains two targets: showMessage and showAnotherMessage with a task dependency. We have the next example Gradle build file to use these Ant tasks and prefix the original Ant task names with ant-:

We can run the tasks task to see if the Ant tasks are imported and renamed:

We can execute the ant-showAnotherMessage task and we get the following output:

Written with Gradle 2.2.1

Gradle Goodness: Rename Ant Task Names When Importing Ant Build File