Not sure if something has changed since this issue was opened, but all I had to do to use the ant scp and sshexec tasks was drop the ant-jsch.jar into gradle's lib dir. This made ant.scp() and ant.sshexec() immediately available. The jsch jar itself already appears to be present (not sure why).

If one drives the build with the Wrapper, then where is "gradle's lib dir"?

I have ANT_HOME set in the environment, with the jsch jar present in ANT_HOME/lib, and the scp Ant task still will not run. I get this

"
Build file '/Users/petrovic/Projects/xoom/qa/prod/ws-server/build.gradle' line: 147

• What went wrong:
  Execution failed for task ':ws-server:tar'.
  > Problem: failed to create task or type scp
  Cause: the class org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.optional.ssh.Scp was not found.
  This looks like one of Ant's optional components.
  Action: Check that the appropriate optional JAR exists in
  -ANT_HOME/lib
  -the IDE Ant configuration dialogs

Do not panic, this is a common problem.
The commonest cause is a missing JAR.

This is not a bug; it is a configuration problem

"

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Thanks again for reporting this issue. We haven't heard back from you after our inquiry from November 15th. We are closing this issue now. Please create an issue on GitHub if you still feel passionate about getting it resolved.