Eclipse & plugins

PhantomBeaker

Hey,

A quick question... and yes I have googled this, but haven't gotten any meaningful results, and I've scoured eclipse.org for something in their documentation.

Basically there are a load of plugins I'd like to play with, like CDT etc etc. But once I download them, they seem to assume you already know how to install them, and haven't quite found this information elsewhere.

The jist I've gotten is that you unzip them in the plugins subdirectory of your eclipse root. Just as an aside, is there anything that I'm missing from this?

My main question is, I've heard it's possible to install plugins if you're not root and don't have some sort of write access to the plugin directory in eclipse's root. Like in college, we have a version of eclipse living on /opt and is shared between users, so installation of plugins is not something that can be easily arranged. I've tried to find out how to install them this way, but I've not found any instructions for this.

Is it possible for users to install their own plugins in their homedir? And, if so, how is it done?

Also, as an aside, the automatic updates tend not to work for me when it comes to installing plugins, so any method involving that probably won't work for me.

Thanks,
Æ

bettlebrox

You can put the plugins into almost any directory and then configure Eclipse to use also look in that directory for plugins. But, there is a catch! The plugins have to go into a directory named plugins, that is a subdirectory called eclipse ... yeah confusing.

This is how I did it on my laptop:

/usr/local/eclipse/eclipse-3.1-plugins/plugins-m8/eclipse/plugins

On my windows box at work I also needed a file in the eclipse directory ( /usr/local/eclipse/eclipse-3.1-plugins/plugins-m8/eclipse/) called .eclipseextension (an empty file)

So you should be able to put these into your home directory. You could do something like this:

mkdirp -p ~/eclipse-plugins/eclipse/plugins
touch ~/eclipse-plugins/eclipse/.eclipseextension

Then unzip the plugins there (or download them using Eclipse).

Hope this helps.

PhantomBeaker

Thanks a million for that information!

Now I'm going to ask a question worthy of an idiot-child. Now, bear in mind that at home I'm using Eclipse 3.0.1 (because it's the version that works on my setup - I tried 3.1 but it didn't work well for me, window sizes kept messing up on me etc), but I can't find where I configure eclipse to look in other directories for plugins.

So far I have scoured the following areas:
project/properties - given that this is just project specific stuff, it's a no-go, but I thought I'd look anyway.
help/"About Eclipse Platform" - well the "Software update" thing isn't under help, so I thought I'd check the about box, as it had some plugin info, but nothing user-configurable
window/preferences - This looked the most promising in the Eclipse options, with the "Plugin Development" options, but they're for exactly that, development.

I also had a look at the file ~/.eclipse/org.eclipse.platform_3.0.1/configuration/config.ini which is confusing at best (i.e. if the settings I need to tweak are in there, it's not blindingly obvious).

So the idiot-child question is: what am I overlooking? Or am I using a very special version of eclipse?

Æ

Blowfish

PhantomBeaker wrote:

Or am I using a very special version of eclipse?

As long as it isn't Native Eclipse, you should be able to do it easily.

Torak

eclipse\links directory

all of the .lnk files contain links to directories which may contain plugins or features.

If you don't have a links directory look at this

Best explanation I could find on the web in two seconds flat:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-ecl-manage/