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I am working with a medium team of developers. So far, everyone has its own version of Eclipse, configured with a slightly different set of plugins and with different configuration options. It is normally a pain to set up a new computer as we have to hunt for a bunch of different plugins and configure everything by hand.

Is there a way to create a software distribution that contains:

  • A preconfigured set of plugins
    • Subclipse
    • Checkstyle (Configured)
    • Formatting styles and suggestions
    • ..etc...
  • Custom perspectives
  • Pre-configured repositories for source code
  • Pre-configured projects
  • A preconfigured workset with locations to retrieve the source code from

In an ideal situation, a person just unzips a file, clicks on the Eclipse icon and voila!, everything is just there.

Mario Ortegón
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  • Mario, ultimately what did you end up doing? – Brian Dec 20 '10 at 19:13
  • Actually, at the end we did a base installation with everything preconfigured in a computer, then because all paths are relative we zipped up and copied it over to other computers. – Mario Ortegón Dec 26 '10 at 21:01

7 Answers7

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The way we do it is simply keep a configured version in a SVN repository and we have a shell script that does any configurations we can't do in the repository. To install, checkout and run the shell script. This also allows us to apply reasonable configuration changes to all future installations with a simple checkin.

Imagist
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    Any extra information you can provide to clarify "configurations we can't do in the repository"? I was recently tasked with a similar task and do not totally understand what is configurable and what is not. – Brian Dec 20 '10 at 18:33
6

I've been checking out the Yoxos-on-demand tool:

http://ondemand.yoxos.com/

It looks extremely nice as it contains some additional Yoxos plugins that allow you to pre-configure many options on the tool, with an option that it's called provisioning.

It is possible to pre-configure many options on the team, checkstyle, and properties settings.

I found also an option that, from an existing Yoxos setup, it is possible to export all the settings and import them into another Yoxos installation.

Mario Ortegón
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You can have a look at :

http://www.poweredbypulse.com/

Especially at the community-edition, which enables to define centralized Eclipse configurations and manage them.

WiseTechi
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it seems that you’ve already found a way to solve your problem, and I admit your post is a bit outdated. But I think, the problem itself is still up to date. If you are still struggling with the mentioned issue, I would like to make a suggestion.

You may want to have a look at yatta Profiles: http://profiles.yatta.de

You can use it to share your Eclipse installation including plugins, projects, working-sets and repositories.

The steps you will have to take are:

  • download and install the tool (Launcher)
  • start it (your existing Eclipse installations will be discovered automatically)
  • click on upload (you can find the menu by clicking on the grey arrow on the right side of your Eclipse profile).

You mentioned that it would be ideal if a person could just unzip a file and click on the Eclipse icon to get started. After you upload your Eclipse with the Launcher, your colleagues can just download and install your preconfigured Eclipse. This is not the exactly the solution you were searching for, but I think it’s pretty close.

Matthias Schmidt
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You might want to look at the answers from Custom Eclipse package, which address the preconfigured set of plugins part of your question.

Community
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Robert Munteanu
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  • Yoxos
  • Pulse
Riyaz Mohammed Ibrahim
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0

I used to work on a eclipse plugin that allows you to define sets of plugins and distribute them centrally. Check out this link: Tikal Update Manager

Gregory Mostizky
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