Question

I recently wrote an Eclipse plugin, and I’m trying to get some coworkers to install it for testing.

As far as I can tell, dropping the .jar into the dropins folder in Eclipse is supposed to install it, but it seems to not be working on any installation of Eclipse but the one I developed on. This seems to be a problem with the dependencies not being installed.

I thought that the dropins folder was supposed to automatically calculate and install dependencies, but perhaps I’m wrong. If so, how can I distribute it without having everybody install each dependency separately?

Answer 1

I’d recommend against using the dropins folder. It is unreliable as you have seen. Instead, I’d recommend that you export your plugin as an update site.

So:

2. Create a feature for your plugin. This is a lot simpler than it sounds. See Lars Vogel’s tutorial: http://www.vogella.de/articles/EclipseFeatureProject/article.html
3. File -> Export… -> Deployable Features.
4. In the options, section, select “Package as individual jar files…” (see screenshot)
5. Tweak other things as required
6. Finish

Now, you have an update site that you can zip up, or put on a web server somewhere. Your colleagues can add that update site just like any other. To install, make sure that they also have all of the dependencies available from other update sites and that they have “Contact all update sites…” checked.

The nice thing about this is that if you place your plugins on a web server somewhere, and you replace it with a new versions, people will be able to update transparently.