This might be a dumb question, but I have a project I am trying to edit a few files for and using eclipse 4.20.0 as an IDE.
When I try to import the directory in eclipse, it creates a completely separate eclipse workspace directory and stores the files in there for my editing. (When I make changes, files in the eclipse workspace directory are changed, but not the original directory)
Is there a way to open the original directory in Eclipse and edit files directly in there? Or am I going to have to work inside the directory eclipse created and then manually move the files over every time to test them again?
I swear I've done this before, but it's been a few years so I might just be importing the directory wrong.
If you are only making a couple changes, just clicking on the .java class you need in your explorer and "Open With... -> Eclipse IDE" will allow you to edit the specific file without opening up a new project. If you are trying to open the project and work on all the files at once, File > Open Projects from File System usually works pretty well on eclipse. If you are opening another eclipse project, just click on the folder where the .project is stored when opening, not necessarily clicking into the folder itself.
I opened the Eclipse as usual from an installer (I downloaded the complete jBPM engine and Eclipse is included with it). I open it from a command prompt. When I opened the Eclipse I found it is empty as it is installed recently. no projects or tabs or anything.
I reopened the project I am working on and found that the main file that containing the code is empty (it is one line with hidden words). I opened the project from its location on the hard disk and I found the file is also empty but I can see that there is something on it.
I tried to open the project on Netbeans but the problem is still exist. I tried to open the file from the local history but I found nothing in the history. Unfortunately I didn't take a backup from my last work. I don't know what to do right now, if you can help it will be appreciated. I attached here a picture for the eclipse with the empty file:
If the project is already deployed in some server then you can decompile them from deployed folder(i.e : webapps folder of Tomcat)
I have tried all different settings, and yes, I m aware of eclipse.ini and config.ini and also tried different command line arguments! Nothing solved my problem!
All attempts and still each time I run eclipse.exe it wants write to my userhome i.e. the .eclipse and .p2 folders.
I have tried with all settings bellow among others, in different combinations too:
-Dosgi.user.area=file:/c:/eclipse-conf/e46
-Dosgi.configuration.area=file:/c:/eclipse-conf/e46
-Dosgi.instance.area=file:/c:/eclipse-conf/e46
-Declipse.p2.data.area=file:/c:/eclipse-conf/e46/p2
-Dorg.eclipse.equinox.p2.configurationFolder=file:/c:/eclipse-conf/e46/p2
-Dorg.eclipse.equinox.p2.installFolder=file:/c:/eclipse-conf/e46/p2
-Dorg.eclipse.equinox.p2.reconciler.dropins.directory=file:/c:/eclipse-conf/e46/p2
-Dorg.eclipse.equinox.p2.cache=file:/c:/eclipse-conf/e46/p2
-Dorg.eclipse.equinox.p2.roaming=file:/c:/eclipse-conf/e46/p2
-Dorg.eclipse.equinox.p2.cache.shared=file:/c:/eclipse-conf/e46/p2
This did not help! Well it writes to /e46 and /e46/p2 folder but it also creates/writes to c:\users\mrsimplemind\.eclipse & .eclipseextension & .p2
Even if I manually create the folders before it will not help.
Now please anyone here had success to fully isolate eclipse configuration output?
The only way I achieved this was by changing the user.home but I don't like this workaround as there are stuff in the original "user.home" that will be needed in eclipse, e.g. .ssh , .git , .m2 maven etc. I don't want to keep duplicates of profile settings for each eclipse user.home
I just want to isolate eclipse, this should be configurable! I don't like the outputs to user.home .. It is not an option! I want to have control of what eclipse creates in what folders, for each eclipse installation.
(I can only tell from windows os, I don't know how if Eclipse on Mac works better with the settings above)
I dont use OOMPH installer, some comments below are misleading
The method I have tried to solve this problem has been nearly successful. Whether this is an answer for you will depend on your minimum acceptable level of quality.
If you are trying to prevent your Eclipse IDE from filling up your home drive, this technique will work (it has worked for me). It should not matter if Eclipse was installed by Oomph or from a plain zip, as nothing Oomph-related is modified in this solution.
If the requirement is that the user home p2 folder can be completely deleted and yet Eclipse still works without recreating that directory, no I have not been able to achieve that yet.
I am posting this as a partial solution, perhaps in the hope someone else can build upon it to figure out a better workaround. Obviously the perfect solution would be if eclipse had a configurable download location and the installer actually installed all software to only the location selected, but that requires the Eclipse developers to fix the "P2" component of the product. What follows is only a workaround.
Strategy
The premise is that the download pool folder always seems to be hardcoded into the config files to be under the home folder of the user that ran the eclipse installer. The essence of this workaround is to create a fake user home folder in the location of your choice, do a massive find-and-replace in the config files, and then force the Java system property to use that new folder as "user.home" which fools Eclipse into using it for its downloads.
Method
This was tested on Eclipse 4.7 Oxygen.3A on Mint Linux.
Extensive brain surgery of the Eclipse installation folder is needed.
Install Eclipse somewhere other than your user's home drive.
In this example the Oomph installer was given /media/LINAPPS/ubuntu-apps/eclipse-oxy as the install target, which then creates /media/LINAPPS/ubuntu-apps/eclipse-oxy/eclipse during the installation.
Start Eclipse at least once, then close it and make sure Eclipse is not running.
Create a new fake user home drive folder underneath the Eclipse folder.
In this example I created eclipse-oxy/eclipse/fakeHome
Copy the entire (hidden) p2 directory from your user home directory into the new fakeHome.
eg cp -R /home/$USER/.p2 /media/LINAPPS/ubuntu-apps/eclipse-oxy/eclipse/fakeHome/.p2
Go to the eclipse folder and edit the eclipse.ini in a text editor. Make these 2 changes:
set the line after --launcher.library to be the copy of the pool in the new location relative to the eclipse folder, eg : fakeHome/.p2/pool/...etc...
append a new system property setting to end of the file after all the other vm arguments, and set user.home to the new fake user home directory.
eg: -Duser.home=/media/LINAPPS/ubuntu-apps/eclipse-oxy/eclipse/fakeHome
Edit the file eclipse/configuration/org.eclipse.update/platform.xml. Find the first <site> entry and change the url attribute to be the new pool folder relative to the eclipse folder. eg: url="file:fakeHome/.p2/pool/"
Edit the file /media/LINAPPS/ubuntu-apps/eclipse-oxy/eclipse/configuration/org.eclipse.equinox.simpleconfigurator/bundles.info and again find and replace all references to you user home's p2 folder with the new p2 folder under the fakeUser. You could find over 1000 matches to replace here. It again seems to be possible to make these relative to the eclipse folder, so a path of "fakeHome/.p2/pool/....." will work.
Go to the new /eclipse/fakeHome/.p2 folder and edit both of the files there "pools.info" and "profiles.info". Again find any reference to your real user home and replace it with the path to the fakeUser folder. Use the full pathname (from root) for the pool location in both of these files.
Unpack, edit, and repack the latest profileRegistry. Find the folder
eclipse/fakeHome/.p2/org.eclipse.equinox.p2.engine/profileRegistry/_media_LINAPPS_ubuntu-apps_eclipse-oxy_eclipse.profile/. Now find the latest timestamped gz file in that folder. For example it might be called "1529736854441.profile.gz".
gunzip that .gz file. Edit the .profile file and again replace any mention of your real user home with the new fakeUser folder. For example in my installation one of the first property settings had to be changed to
<property name='org.eclipse.equinox.p2.cache' value='/media/LINAPPS/ubuntu-apps/eclipse-oxy/eclipse/fakeHome/.p2/pool'/>
Delete the old gz file, then gzip the profile into a gz, so it has replaced the old one.
I also edited the file /eclipse/fakeHome/.p2/org.eclipse.equinox.p2.core/cache/artifacts.xml and replaced the repository name with a reference to the new location inside fakeHome, but I am not sure this was necessary to get eclipse working.
Start eclipse.
Results
After doing the above, I tried to add Install New Software from the Help menu. After downloading lots of new plugins from Redhat and Spring, the new fakeHome pool occupies 900MB, but the original user home pool is still less than 400MB which is what it was as soon as eclipse had been installed. So it has been successful at moving the download cache of the updater and no files get updated in the old location, but two directories under .p2 still seem to have their timestamps touched.
If anyone finds this useful, or figures out how to improve it, please let me know.
This works on Windows 7, Eclipse Oxygen:
Install Eclipse, but DON'T launch it yet
Edit eclipse.ini and, underneath -vmargs, add an entry to change user home to be a shared folder:
e.g.
-vmargs
-Duser.home=C:\Development
Launch Eclipse. Should see ".eclipse", ".tooling", etc folders created in shared folder, and nothing created under your user folder.
As of Eclipse Java 2019-06 for Windows 10 64-bit
I added my eclipse.ini below:
-vmargs
-D"user.home=C:\your_path_here"
The 3 folders of .eclipse, .p2, & .tooling appeared after I started and then closed eclipse.
I am not sure when these are written into the new path, but it worked in my Windows 10.
Did you try adding the following line to eclipse.ini below -vmargs:
-Dosgi.configuration.area=#user.home/.someFolder
which will use .someFolder instead of .eclipse
or
-Dosgi.configuration.area=C:\path_to_desired_location\.eclipseJAVA
I've installed NetBeans 6.9.1 and installed few updates for it.
Then I've created a new project from existing sources. After a few changes I've closed it. And now I am having an error, when trying to open a new project from existing sources (the same files):
Sources directory is already netbeans project (maybe only in memory).
After Googling it, I noticed it happened not only with me. But I didn't find the correct solution. I've tried to restart the IDE, I've tried to restart the PC, I've tried to reinstall NetBeans. Nothing helped.
Thank you!
I was having the same problem:
Sources directory is already NetBeans project (maybe only in memory).
Netbeans creates a folder in your project named "nbproject". Once you delete that, restart the IDE and you're good to go.
When you create a NetBeans project from existing sources, NetBeans uses the same directory to add its own files: a netbeans folder with .proj files.
Solution: delete the netbeans folder and restart the IDE. Opening a new project should now work.
Go to the folder containing your project
Delete the folder named nbproject
Restart Netbeans
Try creating your project again from the original folder
This means the project folder is already a netbeans project. So instead of adding it as a new project open it as
This happens(i believe) because netbeans tries to version control the files created or edited.
Under the project folder netbeans create a netbeans directory just delete it . This has been tested in Ubuntu. Then you can import your project if php then php using existing sources.
Click File >> Recent Projects > and you should be able to use edit it again. Hope it helps :)
On Windows at least none of these answers work (for me anyway!). I have found the only way is to copy an existing netbeans project folder in to your new project and manually edit the xml project name.
I also opened the private/private.xml and removed the open files xml just incase these caused problems.
Once I'd done this the project works as normal.
I checked the "Put NetBeans metadata in separate directory" tick and it works fine.
This is in 2. Name and Location after you choose PHP from existing source
In my case my project root directory consists ".project". This contain the XML reference of the project name.
By removing this, i am able to create a project.
Usually this happened when we copy source code of a already created project and copied in different folder and try to create a project from it. as netBeans create its folder nbproject in our project folder this folder also get copied with our source code and it give error "Sources directory is already NetBeans project (maybe only in memory)" remove this folder from you newly copied folder and voila you can create a new project.
If this is your own source code and you already have a Netbeans project folder with your source files you should just start with:
File | Open Project...
not
File | New Project ...
because the project is not new.
If it helps anyone else, I had the same problem and the solution was to reinstall NetBeans.
I had tried all sorts of fixes: Deleting the NetBeansProjects folders, checking/unchecking "Put Netbeans metadata in a separate directory", killing/restarting NetBeans, restarting the system, etc. Nothing cleared the message...except the reinstall.
The advice here about removing the nbproject directory is not quite the whole story.
What Netbeans seems to do (and we are guessing at reverse engineering here) is to look for an xml file which has opening and closing project tags in it. This it concludes is evidence of an already existing project. Now if your files have an nbproject directory there, that will contain a project.xml file which contains the said tags. So removing that will do what you want.
But, my files don't have a nbproject directory but still NetBeans tells me there is an existing project maybe in memory. The reason is: my files include a file called pom.xml and that contains the said project tags in the xml (it was created by an entirely different system). Once that xml file is removed, then NetBeans will create an html project for me importing my code.
In sum: look through any xml files in you existing code, and be wary of project tags.
This happened to me when I tried to import an Eclipse project in a brand new NetBeans 7.2.1 install on Ubuntu 12.04LTS.
I mistakenly selected the import projects from workspace (the first option in the import wizard's opening pane) on the first attempt, and it opened the project in the original Eclipse workspace path (which was on a usb stick).
From this, I then realized that I actually need the second option - import project ignoring project dependencies, which lets you specifically choose source and destination folders. After closing the project, I tried to import again with the proper option, but it didn't work.
From then on nothing I did helped - restart the IDE, move the source folder, nothing. There was no nbproject folder in the project or /var/cache in the user folder to delete (in-fact there was no nbproject folder in the whole file-system).
Since restart didn't work, I'm guessing that there is a garbage project entry somewhere which Nb reads (See Martin Frické answer above).
After googling along the lines of 'netbeans clear memory project cache' with no success, I opted to reinstall NetBeans -
sudo /usr/local/netbeans-7.2.1/uninstall
sudo ./netbeans-7.2.1-ml-javase-linux.sh
which solved it.
If you are on a Mac, press command shift G and in the box type /users and then go, next click on your user name and navigate to netbeansprojects and open it. Then delete the ones in there that are causing problems. You can then create your project.
Note: I had moved my wordpress folder to my desktop trying to figure this out, so I dropped it back into the origional location and it works fine. So if you did this, just replace the wordpress folder after deleting the problem projects from the netbeansprojects folder and its contents back to the original installation folder.
Hope this helps...:)
This is what I did to solve this error:
1) I copied a folder named "folder1" (and I called the new folder "folder2"). "folder1" was a Netbeans project so it had a folder called "nbproject" inside it.
2) When I tried to create a project out of the "folder2", Netbeans threw an error "Sources directory is already netbeans project (maybe only in memory)."
3) Inside Netbeans delete the project of "folder1". Then, delete the two folders named "nbproject" (one is inside "folder1" and the other is inside "folder2").
4) Inside Netbeans, create two new projects: one for "folder1" and another for "folder2". The error should not appear anymore.
copy an existing netbeans project folder in to your new project and manually edit the xml project name.
reinstall netbeans
copy/move all files/folders (except nbproject/ folder) to a new folder for your project, with a new name.
Try to create a new empty project; then you can copy the public_html to the new project folder and it will appear .
I faced the same issue:
Sources directory is already NetBeans project (maybe only in memory).
The solution is:
Netbeans creates a folder in your project named "nbproject". Once you
delete that, restart the IDE and you're good to go.
I've just installed a new Linux distro on my box and want to move my Eclipse home from the old /home/username/ to my new one. Because I changed the desktop, I don't want to copy all hidden folders from ~/. So which directories do I need copy in order to have all my installed plugins?
I've already copied ~/.eclipse/ and it definitely contains files related to the plugins but Eclipse won't load them. Any hints?
We've eventually found the directory containing all that stuff by accident. Somehow we broke it and Eclipse refused to start on my coworker's computer:-)
See ~/workspace/.metadata/.plugins or wherever your workspace resides.
As far as I know, Eclipse stores its plugins in its installation directory (eclipse). They might reside in eclipse/plugins or eclipse/dropins. You can copy the whole eclipse directory from your old box.