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Eclipse tip o' the day

By default, Eclipse expects all its plugins to be in $ECLIPSE_HOME/plugins. This doesn't work too well for upgrading since you have to copy all of your installed plugins to Eclipse everytime you upgrade. To solve this, you can place all your plugins in an external direct and point to them using a link file. To do this, create a links directory in $ECLIPSE_HOME and create a file inside it that points to an alternate location. The name of this file doesn't seem to matter, but it must end with a ".link" extension. In this file, put a path:

path=C:\\Tools\\myplugins

Then in c:\Tools\myplugins, create an Eclipse-like directory structure so you end up with c:\Tools\myplugins\eclipse\plugins. Then drop your plugins in that directory. If you choose to use an alternate workspace as well, upgrading Eclipse will be as easy as copying in your links folder. BTW, here's more information on upgrading Eclipse.

Posted in Java at Aug 25 2004, 07:35:52 PM MDT 10 Comments

Comments:

As of about 3.0M8, you don't have to go through the link file routine... Instead, when you are in the update manager, and you download a new plugin, it will ask you what site you want to download to, presenting the default built-in site, which is underneath eclipse itself. You can instead at that point create a new site yourself, which can be anywhere. The plugin(s) will be download there instead of into Eclipse. Then when you get a new version of Eclipse, go to Help | Software Updates | Manage Configurations, and just do an 'Add Extension Location', using the hyperlink on the right pane, or a right click on the left tree, and add the external update site you previously created before. It will then see all the plugins there, and you can enable them as you wish. You can also manually drop in plugins into the extension location, and they will be picked up.

Posted by Colin Sampaleanu on August 25, 2004 at 08:53 PM MDT #

Cool - thanks Colin. The project I'm working on right now wants to distribute plugins pre-packaged with Eclipse so using the update manager isn't an option - unless I can hook into it's config files and specify all the bundled plugins. Then the user could update them from w/in Eclipse. Hmmmm.

Posted by Matt Raible on August 25, 2004 at 10:11 PM MDT #

ain't what colin is saying only applies to plugins that provides software updates on the web? most of eclipse plugins are still distributed using an archive and you drop it by yourself.

Posted by 66.142.135.93 on August 26, 2004 at 09:03 AM MDT #

Matt,

You are suppose to be able to do what Colin saying within RCP applications. You may want to look at the new OSGi features. I think if you use the RCP, you have access to all the OSGi functionality that was added to Eclipse 3.0. This allows you load, unload, update and install plugins. Here is a web article that might be helpful. http://www.eclipse.org/equinox/index.html

If you have another other Eclipse questions, just buzz me. Another place to check with is Ed Burnett's EclipsePowered blog. He got some good articles on the RCP.

Posted by Jeff Duska on August 26, 2004 at 11:58 AM MDT #

What do you mean by [quote]links[/quote] directory?

Posted by Ali Pope on August 26, 2004 at 04:01 PM MDT #

It's just a directory named "links" - just like Eclipse has a "plugins" directory. Here's my 3.0 directory structure.

eclipse
  + configuration
  + features
    links
  + plugins
    readme

Posted by Matt Raible on August 26, 2004 at 04:06 PM MDT #

10x for the quick answer... just a second before receiving it I managed to get him work. Very nice! 10x a lot!

Posted by Ali Pope on August 26, 2004 at 04:09 PM MDT #

To the person who asked if my tip only applied to plugins downloaded via the update manager, not at all. If you do download a plugin through the update manager and tell it that you want to create a new site to download to, that's exactly the same thing as an 'extension location', and you can create one or more manually, and then let Eclipse know about them, through the UI, as I mentioned above. As for the format, all it is a dir which has inside it a directory called 'eclipse', and inside that', a 'features' directory, and a 'plugins' directory, as well as a file called '.eclipseextension'. The contents of the .eclipseextension file are: ----- id=org.eclipse.platform name=Eclipse Platform version=3.0.0 ----- Now you only really have to do this once, either through the download process, or manually creating it, then like I said, for new versions of Eclipse you just point at it through the UI.

Posted by Colin Sampaleanu on August 27, 2004 at 10:21 AM MDT #

Let's try that again with some formatting: To the person who asked if my tip only applied to plugins downloaded via the update manager, not at all. If you do download a plugin through the update manager and tell it that you want to create a new site to download to, that's exactly the same thing as an 'extension location', and you can create one or more manually, and then let Eclipse know about them, through the UI, as I mentioned above. As for the format, all it is a dir which has inside it a directory called 'eclipse', and inside that', a 'features' directory, and a 'plugins' directory, as well as a file called '.eclipseextension'. The contents of the .eclipseextension file are: -----

id=org.eclipse.platform
name=Eclipse Platform
version=3.0.0

----- Now you only really have to do this once, either through the download process, or manually creating it, then like I said, for new versions of Eclipse you just point at it through the UI.

Posted by Colin Sampaleanu on August 27, 2004 at 10:23 AM MDT #

Here is a detailed blog about how you can configure eclipse plugin in a teamed environment. This we are using in our company and really working well.

Posted by srikanth balusani on September 02, 2004 at 11:44 PM MDT #

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