Liferay IDE plugin installation in Eclipse process

[Miguel Cruz, modificado hace 11 años.]

Hi all !

I would like to know which are the steps that are internally made in order to install the Liferay IDE plugin in Eclipse.

I mean, I've seen that from the zip file used to update eclipse:
- the jar files included on features folder are copied and extracted in the features folder of Eclipse.
- I suppose that the jar files included on plugins folder are copied to the plugins folder of Eclipse (don't know if just copied or any of them also extracted)
- I don't know what is done with artifects.jar and content.jar
- Maybe any configuration file in Eclipse is also updated ???

Is there any kind of detailed information about this process?

Thank you very much !

[Dhrutika Parekh, modificado hace 11 años.]

Hi,

Other than zip,you can provide URL to IDE update site. Please refer this wiki or more info related to update site.

http://www.liferay.com/community/wiki/-/wiki/Main/Liferay+IDE+Installation+Guide
http://www.liferay.com/community/wiki/-/wiki/Main/Liferay+IDE

Regards,
Dhrutika

[Miguel Cruz, modificado hace 11 años.]

Hi Dhrutika,

Thank you for the information. The installation works ok for me (using the zip, the URL or the Eclipse Marketplace)

It's only that I would like to know how this process works and what it does so that it can be manually reproduced in an environment in which users don't have access to the classical update ways because of some security restrictions in their IDE

I'm afraid that information is not covered by the wiki

Thank you very much, regards

[Dhrutika Parekh, modificado hace 11 años.]

Hi,

Sorry,but I don't have that information.

But Now Lferay IDE(Developer Studio) is available,so you can use that directly. Refer this link:

http://www.liferay.com/downloads/liferay-projects/liferay-ide

Regards,
Dhrutika

[Gregory Amerson, modificado hace 11 años.]

Miguel Cruz:

Hi Dhrutika,

Thank you for the information. The installation works ok for me (using the zip, the URL or the Eclipse Marketplace)

It's only that I would like to know how this process works and what it does so that it can be manually reproduced in an environment in which users don't have access to the classical update ways because of some security restrictions in their IDE

I'm afraid that information is not covered by the wiki

Thank you very much, regards

Hi Miguel,

To install locally or an offline installation you can download the archived update site (updatesite zip file). Then in your Eclipse environment go to

• Help > Install new software...
• Add...
• Archive...
• Browse to the updatesite zip file
• Select the Liferay IDE feature as usual
• finish the install

Let me know if this doesn't work for you.

[Miguel Cruz, modificado hace 11 años.]

Hi Gregory,

Yes, the installation works perfectly.

It's only that users (developers in this case) won't be able to do that neither, and there is a department in charge of this kind of updates to Eclipse environment that want to know whic are the exact steps that this update makes in Eclipse, in order to automate this process.

The idea is that when one of their developers need to work with Liferay they'll execute some kind of script that will update their "closed" Eclipse environment with the Liferay IDE plugin, but they need to reproduce this update step by step because that's how the process works for other technlogies.

I hope I have explained a bit more my question

Thank you very much, regards

[Gregory Amerson, modificado hace 11 años.]

Miguel Cruz:

The idea is that when one of their developers need to work with Liferay they'll execute some kind of script that will update their "closed" Eclipse environment with the Liferay IDE plugin, but they need to reproduce this update step by step because that's how the process works for other technlogies.

I hope I have explained a bit more my question

That makes perfect sense. Many organizations wisely make the choice to lock down development environments especially related to Eclipse since you can lose so many man hours that are due to development environmental issues.

Anyways there are several commercial solutions that solve this whole idea including many more. I'll point you to one that I have worked with personally, http://www.poweredbypulse.com It is a eclipse environmental provisioning solution that go from a few developers to large enterprises.

If you want to do everything in house, Eclipse itself provides a headless, command line utility for performing install/updates. Its called p2-director. http://help.eclipse.org/juno/index.jsp?topic=%2Forg.eclipse.platform.doc.isv%2Fguide%2Fp2_director.html

With it you can perform an update/install to a local eclipse application and point to a shared repository location (zip file). Here is an example:

Hope that helps!

[Miguel Cruz, modificado hace 11 años.]

Hi Gregory,

Thank you very much for the information, I didn't know about those tools and they seem quite interesting.

But for my particular case I think they won't help, as the developers won't be able to update their environment with the tool they choose, but only with the special tool that their department has for them (which uses its own scripts to copy and modify files in their basic Eclipse installation)

I thought it would be easy to know how to reproduce the install process of the plugin, as the zip file doesn't have so many files inside and many of them are just copied or unzipped, but I haven't got to know it yet.

Should I contact support or does it exist any page or document where I can find that information?

Thank you very much, regards

[Gregory Amerson, modificado hace 11 años.]

Hey Michael,

The tool you need to perform an automated install would be the p2 director application: http://help.eclipse.org/juno/index.jsp?topic=%2Forg.eclipse.platform.doc.isv%2Fguide%2Fp2_director.html

There really is not other way, other than just having all of the developers go through the process of installing on their eclipse themselves which you said they don't have permission to do. So the way to do it would be to roll out a script for all users to execute that executes the p2 director using a command from examples in that link. The only catch is that the repository zip file would need to be made available on a shared drive that all of the desktop workstations would have access to. So an example version of the command that would need to be executed would be

%ECLIPSE_DIR%\eclipse.exe
-nosplash
-application
org.eclipse.equinox.p2.director
-repository
%LIFERAY_IDE_REPOSITORY_URL%
-installIU
com.liferay.ide.eclipse.tools.feature.group
-destination
%ECLIPSE_DIR$
-profile
epp.package.jee
-profileProperties"
org.eclipse.update.install.features=true
-bundlepool
%ECLIPSE_DIR%
-p2.os
win32
-p2.ws
win32
-p2.arch
x86_64
-roaming

Hope this helps.

[Miguel Cruz, modificado hace 11 años.]

Hi Gregory,

Thank you very much, the command works perfectly.

Anyway I was able to reproduce mannually the plugin installation doing the following:

- Decompress the jar files of "features" into Eclipse's features folder (each jar is decompressed in its own folder)
- Copy the jar files from "plugins" into Eclipse's plugins folder
- Add the artifacts from artifacts.jar into Eclipse's artifacts.xml file

Regards

[Gregory Amerson, modificado hace 11 años.]

Miguel Cruz:

Hi Gregory,

Thank you very much, the command works perfectly.

Anyway I was able to reproduce mannually the plugin installation doing the following:

- Decompress the jar files of "features" into Eclipse's features folder (each jar is decompressed in its own folder)
- Copy the jar files from "plugins" into Eclipse's plugins folder
- Add the artifacts from artifacts.jar into Eclipse's artifacts.xml file

Regards

Hi Miguel,

Thanks for the additional info. Just for your own info, I wanted to let you know that the process you described is not enough to be considered a full installation. For Eclipse to full realize your installation the p2 profile metadata must be updated to contain the new bundles. Take a look at this file:
<eclipse_dir>/p2/org.eclipse.equinox.p2.engine/profileRegistry/<profile-name>.profile/<latest-timestamp>.profile.gz

If you unzip that file its another big xml file that defines which bundles makes up the running profile. This also has to be updated, but you should never do this by hand, only the p2 director or similar application should modify these to make sure that it is done in a management way (uninstallable, etc).

Hope this helps. Good luck.

[Miguel Cruz, modificado hace 11 años.]

Hi Gregory,

Thank you very much for the information.

I will definitively recommend using the p2 director utililty to install the plugin.

Regards