I have exhausted just about every link I could find on this topic --- my Google searches are pure purple links now. It's possible I overlooked something, but anyway...
A user, who does not have root access, would like to use PyDev for Eclipse. We are using Eclipse 3.6.1, Linux x86_64. I have identified that the highest working version of PyDev that we can use is 2.8.0 (did this by using root access to discover that versions higher than that won't install).
All guides point to being able to use the .eclipse folder in the user's home directory, but no matter what I put in there, what combination of subfolders, etc., Eclipse absolutely will not detect PyDev.
Let me break down my process for testing this, one step at a time:
cd .eclipse/org.eclipse.platform_3.6.1_793567567/
mkdir dropins
mkdir dropins/PyDev-2.8.0
cd dropins/PyDev-2.8.0
wget <2.8.0 zip file>
unzip PyDev\ 2.8.0.zip
This results in...
~/
.eclipse/
artifacts.xml
configuration/
dropins/
PyDev-2.8.0/
features/
plugins/
p2/
Like I said, I've re-arranged this in multiple combinations such that "features" and "plugins" are one directory higher, two directories higher, etc. No combination will seem to do the trick.
When I execute eclipse, I'm using:
eclipse -clean -console -consoleLog
There's never any mention anywhere about PyDev's presence even being acknowledged.
A lot of the guides I've found online seem based on Windows. While eclipse.ini does exist for Linux, and while some guides say that file needs to be modified to include the home directory sub-directory, that file is inaccessible to all but root (and therefore cannot be modified).
Is this going to be doable with absolutely zero root intervention?
Why would you even need root access? Just have them download the current version from eclipse.org, unpack it somewhere, run it, and add PyDev.
Related
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.
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 recently re-organised my Eclipse installation directories, to cater for various flavours of Eclipse (Helios, Indigo, Juno), but then this caused a problem as the ".eclipse" directory (that lives in my home directory) has sub folders that identify the eclipse version but end with a suffix that I think identifies the install directory
for example: org.eclipse.platform_3.6.1_12345678
So with changing the Eclipse install directory, and then booting up Eclipse, a new subfolder was created and the knowledge of my plugins installed is lost.
Why does Eclipse do this ? And how can I manage Eclipse such that I can tie the 2 directories together so I am free to move installation folder without breaking anything?
Is there any good practices of managing multiple Eclipse installations, with respect to configuration ( plugins ), and workspaces ?
By default, eclipse always stores its local configuration in the user's home .eclipse folder. You can override the default though.
In the eclipse.ini file for each of your different versions, you can add the following JVM parameter (make sure you add this line below the -vmargs line)
-Dosgi.configuration.area=#user.home/.eclipse<version>
where
<version>
is whatever identifier you choose for that particular version of eclipse.
This should help keep the different configurations separate and prevent them from stomping on each other.
Hope this helps.
I recently decided to switch to my MBP for full time dev work. I need to install Eclipse and all the tutorials I have seen always put it in the Applications folder. Does eclipse need to be installed there? I would prefer to keep programs that I get from .tar.gz in my ~/opt directory and want to make sure putting eclipse there will not cause any issues. Is Applications just like Program Files on windows a common place to store programs but not a required one.
I appreciate the feedback.
Greg
I've been running on my MBP for a while. I have STS (spring's eclipse based IDE) in ~/apps/sts so I think it's safe to say you can put it anywhere you want as long as you have the correct permissions.
You can put Eclipse anywhere, the /Applications folder, or your home ~/ folder. If you want to keep multiple version of Eclipse, after you installation, you can even rename folder name.
With Eclipse 3.4, is it possible to provide an ADDITIONAL plugin directory from command line? Something like:
eclipse -plugin_dir D:/myproduct/V1.1/plugins -clean
This is just to save copying of plugins everytime.
While copying can be done with script, it's possible that user may not have
write permissions to system install eclipse.
Follow up:
The solution given by #VonC is for reusing same plugins in multiple Eclipses.
I'm looking for a to use Multiple versions of plugins with Same Eclipse.
( If user has Version 1.1 and Vesion 1.2 of my plugin installed )
Resolved:
The directory pointed to by -Dorg.eclipse.equinox.p2.reconciler.dropins.directory
should end with a directory named 'eclipse'
Inside this eclipse where should be directory called plugins,
place all the jars at in the plugins directory
create a launcher , which launch eclipse with additional command line:
-vmargs
-Dorg.eclipse.equinox.p2.reconciler.dropins.directory=AbsolutePath\eclipse
One may want to add -clean also ..
As mentionned in Installing Eclipse (3.4+) plugins in a directory other than ECLIPSE_HOME/plugins, the right way is to define a bundle pools (also introduced here)
See my previous answer for more details.
It space is not a big issue, users can copy the system install of eclipse into a work directory and put additional plugins/features in the dropins/ directory.