I am using Spring System Tool Suite. The IDE creates an additional folder named .eclipse in my #user.home folder. How can I move the .eclipse folder to somewhere else and make the Spring STS use the new path (instead of recreating and using a new .eclipse folder in #user.home)?
I didn't see an option to change that location by default (it happens when the install is read-only and a user needs a writable configuration area). You could alway try and pass in a better configuration area to osgi.configuration.area. See Setting the private configuration area for the suggested option and Runtime Options for more information in general.
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 used the fancy new installer to install Eclipse Mars on my OS X box and since it was asking for a folder and had a lot of fiddly config details to set, I wasn't sure what it was going to do to my system so I created a new folder ~/Applications/Eclipse/ to put it in.
Fortunately it created an app package, Eclipse.app, so I wanted to move it into /Applications (out of my account folder into the common apps for all users of the box). So I dragged it (it's what you're supposed to be able to do, y'know).
DOH! That did not work. It crashes and crashes and crashes. Moving it back makes it happy again.
What would I need to do to move Eclipse.app, other than delete and reinstall and then reinstall all the plugins and SDKs I added?
The likely problem here is that Eclipse anticipates the directory structure around it, and fails when the actual directory structure doesn't match its expectations. The simplest solution is to create an alias (like a PC shortcut) in the Applications folder that links back to the application in the folder where it is installed by default.
To do this on a Mac, right click the application, which should be in the user root like so:
~/eclipse/java-mars/Eclipse.app
You should see the dropdown below. Click the "Make Alias" option to create an alias for Eclipse in the same folder. Then just rename this alias "Eclipse," and drag and drop it in Applications, where it should work just fine.
Looks like the installer puts a lot of files, including the actual plugins, into folders under the .p2 folder in your home directory. This is true no matter where you install eclipse, with the installer. So either other users would need at least read access to some locations in your account, or you moved your .p2 folder to a central location and changed the eclipse.ini file (embedded in a folder under the eclipse.app folder) to point to the correct location. If you leave the .p2 folder in your account, you'd still need to alter the myeclipse.ini file, as it uses relative paths to files.
For your situation, you might be better off using the standard installation method (unzipping the distribution file), moving the installation to /Applications.
When Eclipse starts, it generates folders such as the workspace and the .eclipse folder which is found in the user folder in Windows environments.
While the location of the first one is easy to set (Eclipse asks you about the workspace location), I've got a lot of troubles setting the location I want for the .eclipse folder.
In fact, the problem comes from the fact that I have 2 different hard drives : C:/ and D:/.
I would like Eclipse to create his .eclipse folder in C:/Users/username. Instead, it creates it in D:/Users/username.
I don't find any way to force the location of the .eclipse folder. Adding "osgi.configuration.area=C:/Users/username\" in the eclipse.ini proved relevant partially : the eclipse configuration part of the .eclipse folder is located where I want, but other folders found in the .eclipse aren't moved, therefore Eclipse still creates a .eclipse in D:/.
I simply would like to find a correct line of code to put in the eclipse.ini (for example) in order to have Eclipse creating the files he automatically creates in C:/Users/username instead of D:/Users/username.
What do I have to do to copy a complete workspace from one computer to another and be simply able to continue working on it on the other computer?
In general, a filesystem copy should be sufficient. If you run into problems with your projects, try removing the project from the workspace (without deleting the files) and then re-add the project, which will rebuild the metadata.
Make sure you shut down eclipse before you copy the workspace, and that the target computer has the same (or higher) eclipse version, including the same plugins.
Check that your workspace actually contains all the projects - when creating a project, it's possible to have its files situated outside the workspace.
If your projects use any external libraries installed on the system, install these on the other system in the same place (or adjust the paths).
Then, there should be no problem.
You shouldn't have any issues with a straight filesystem copy as long as your eclipse versions match up.
If they don't, the project metadata may not load correctly
You need to copy the whole folder which you select as your workspace at startup (or you once selected). All settings are included in there (even the opened files).
I use rsync for this. Works great.
I'd like to associate some ANT targets with my project's build in Eclipse.
No problem, I create a custom ANT builder, specify targets to run, all is well.
But then I realize that the builder information is saved in the workspace instead of the project! Why is that, and how do I fix it?
The goal is that anyone who imports the project in a new Eclipse workspace can build it without adding the builder manually. This means that I should have the builder configuration under source control, which means it should belong to the project, not the per-user workspace.
Maybe I'm just missing something?
There is a bit of confusion, it seems, because builders look like launchers, but they are stored in a different directory. Simply creating the .settings dir and copying the xml doesn't help...
When I create the .externalToolBuilders directory under .settings and copy the launcher/builder there, I get this:
Solution:
I restarted from scratch, deleted the project-specific data in the workspace directory, but left the .settings dir in the project dir. Re-created the builder/launcher, and Eclipse automatically created it in the correct place, and also added it to source control.
Indeed, your launcher (Run/Debug launchers or External Builders launchers) are saved by default in the workspace.
<workspace>\myProject\.externalToolsBuilder)
You can move that directory (.externalToolsBuilder) manually in the .settings directory of your project.
And uncheck the option "Delete configurations when associated resource is deleted" as mentioned in this SO answer.
With a full refresh of the project (or even a delete, followed by a reimport), your local version of .externalToolsBuilder should be taken into account.
For the Debug/Run launchers (not your case), you also can (since Eclipse3.4) use one of the Import wizards:
File > Import
type launch configuration, and you can import said configuration directly within your project.