I have limited space on my C drive, hence installing Eclipse in my E drive. After installation I find that about 1mb is on my E drive and all the rest is on my C drive!
Any idea how to get Eclipse to actually install in the folder I want? in previous versions all plugins went into the plugins folder of the install, but it seems Neon wants to install everything into a .p2 folder in my user folder.
Which is pretty useless too if I wanted Eclipse to be available to other users too...
thanks.
It appears that you downloaded the Windows installer version, which I would avoid if at all possible. While it is possible to tweak your installation to behave as expected, I suggest uninstalling it and downloaded the package of your choice from Eclipse Downloads. Unzip the package on your E: drive. The resulting eclipse directory will house all current files and plugins and others as you add/download them. The .p2 directory will still be created in your user directory, but will not contain anything other than some user-specific configuration information.
You can create a shortcut to eclipse.exe or on Windows 10 right-click and Pin to Start for easy reference. Also make sure that any workspaces you create are created someplace other than your user directory.
Related
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 downloaded and ran eclipse.exe.exe for installation, but it doesn't get added to the Programs as an Installed software. I always get to locate the .exe and launch the IDE from there. Any thoughts why it doesn't get installed as a Program?
Eclipse doesn't work as a regular installation, but as an archive of related files, majorly because to create as much as a loose connection to the environment/OS as possible. Applications that are installed need to update data in OS registry and is therefore on some points restricted. In your Eclipse IDE you can specify own registries with data relevant for the project.
Another benefit is that it's easily updated and can also be easily shared between work stations without installation. That gives flexibility, if your workspace is corrupted, you don't need to uninstall, reinstall, restart and all that stuff. All you need is to take a back up of your plugins folder inside you Eclipse, and then discard the current directory, unzip the original download and replace your plugins with the backup. You are up and running on a new instance, no holds barred !!
My "~/eclipse" folder contains the following subfolders: about_files, configuration, dropins, features, p2, plugins, readme.
Is it important to include this folder, or some of its subfolders, in the regular backup of my hard-drive? Or are they just standard files that come with the installation and can always be restored by re-installing Eclipse?
Making a backup of the complete eclipse folder makes sense as it contains all the plug-ins which you have installed. Sometimes eclipse breaks because of a new plug-in or just any random problem. Then it's great to have a backup and you don't need to install every plug-in which you had before.
I'm new to Eclipse, there is a project at work that is set up and running, I want to set it up just like that on my home PC so I can look at it in my spare time, so I zipped up the project directory, and unzipped it on my home PC, but it didn't work like Netbeans, seems missing lots of parts/plug-ings ? How do I know what plug-ins are needed for the project at work, so I can install them at home, the project is large and someone else developed it, is there a way in Eclipse to zip up all the plugins related to the project with the project and unzip and install them automatically ?
The easiest way to reproduce the installed plugins should be File->Export->Install->Installed Items to File. The resulting file can be imported on your machine using File->Import->Install->Software items from file and will lead to installing all plugins which are available on the first machine.
Notes:
This requires that the plugins from the first machine can be found via public update sites, as that exported file will only contain a list of meta data from where to install the plugins, not the actual jar files.
The export includes all plugins of the first machine. You can deselect some of them, but there is no automated way to find only the ones needed for your project.
Requires Eclipse 3.7 or newer.
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.