Easy and smart way to install Eclipse plugins

You can install the eclipse plugin in 2 standard ways:
1. Download the plugin from web and place both the "features" and "plugins" folder's contents into your eclipse installation features and plugins folders respectively.
2. You can install through "Update Manager"() by giving the update URL.

Note: The disadvantage with the above approaches are, all the installed plugins will work for only your eclipse installation. If your eclipse crashes, you will ended up with installing all the plugins that you did. And moreover every team member has to do the same every time they install Eclipse.

There is one other way that you can install Eclipse plugin and get rid of above disadvantage. And its pretty easy I believe. Please follow the steps below:

1. Create a folder structure like below anywhere in your shared folder. (The folder name must be 'eclipse' with subfolders matching exactly 'features' and 'plugins')







2. Download the plugins from web and place features folder contents and plugin folder contents into respective folders that you have created above.

3. Create a new folder called "links" in your eclipse home installation like below and create a new plain text file called plugins.link (Technically, it can be called anything.link). In it put the line path=...\My Shared Folder (i.e. path value should be the eclipse folder path that you have created above.)



4. Finally launch the eclipse. It will notices the links/plugin.link file and load any plugins from that path as well.

Advantage: With this approach you will be decoupling external plugins with your eclipse installation so that way you can have your team share the same plugins every time they change their project preferences or eclipse installation.




No comments:

Post a Comment

Python contextlib for Timing Python code

If you've ever found yourself needing to measure the execution time of specific portions of your Python code, the `contextlib` module o...