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Installing the Eclipse IDE

This file documents a procedure for setting up Eclipse for typical web development use. The process seems a little involved but it is a huge project with many separately managed areas of functionality. Many people give up before they get a working copy installed which is a shame coz is such a great IDE.

There are three steps required to get Eclipse up and running:

  • install the base IDE
  • patch and setup automatic updates
  • install add-ons for your development language/s

note: If you already have an older copy of Eclipse installed it is possible to have more than one copy installed at a time as they reside in their own self-contained folders. Just be sure to install into a new folder, e.g. c:\eclipse3.3\ instead of overwriting your old folders contents

Install the base Eclipse IDE

The current stable release of the Eclipse framework as of October/2007 is v3.3 (aka Europa). The framework itself and the various add-on projects are all available from the eclipse downloads sites, but at the very least you should download ZIPs of the following key components:

Extract all files to a local folder on your desktop, e.g. C:\eclipse\, ensure that you extract all files of the archive and that the "use folder names" check-box is selected. Each of them uses a top-level folder of 'eclipse' with the same sub-folder structure as they are intended to be installed together under one tree.

Now that the ZIPs have been extracted into your local drive you can start the IDE by clicking C:\eclipse\eclipse.exe (you might want to create a short-cut to the .exe on your desktop)

If it does not run its probably because the Java runtime cannot be found, or there is an incorrect version of the Java installed (v1.5 is required). Check your JAVA_HOME and PATH system environment variables to make sure they point to wherever your 1.5 JRE is installed.

When you start-up Eclipse for the first time you will be prompted to select a workspace folder. This is a directory that will be used to store configuration information about projects you will be working on, not necessarily the code files you write, more meta data about them. You should probably point this to a backed-up network share location rather than your local drive.

When the IDE appears it may prompt you to check for "Automatic Updates" which you should do. See following.

Updating/Patching the base install

After extracting the product to your local drive you should now perform an update of the base install to pickup latest patches. If you are behind a corporate firewall then before attempting updates you will need to setup proxy preferences by going ... 'Window' -> 'Preferences' -> 'General' -> 'Network Connections' and entering 'YOURPROXYADDRESS.com', port '80' and your username and password

After setting proxy preferences, to perform an update click ... 'Help' -> 'Software Updates' -> 'Search for updates of currently installed features'

You'll be presented with a list of mirror sites, there are no NZ mirrors at this point, the fastest ones tend to be west-coast-USA sites rather than Australia so go for something like "Portland State University"

As of October/2007 the following eclipse project updates are available and should be selected and applied:

  • Eclipse SDK (to v3.3.1)
  • GEF/Graphical Editing Framework (to v3.3.1)
  • XSD/XML Schema Infoset Model (to v2.3.1)
  • WTP/Web Tools Platform (to v2.0.1)
  • DTP/Data Tools Platform (to v1.5.1) (requires something that was missing)

Click 'I accept the terms', then 'Next', then 'Finish' to install the patches.

You may have dialogue boxes pop-up titled "Feature Verification" concerning unsigned updates. As these are components we are expecting to install as a base part of Eclipse you can safely click "Install All" in this case

Once finished Eclipse will ask to be restarted, which you should do.

On restarting you should let the Automatic update run again, in case there are subsequent minor releases or updates to the above, as of October 2007 there are subsequent patches for:

  • Eclipse RCP Patch for v3.3.1

Once your all patched you will probably want to turn off automatic-updates as it takes some and is fired off every time you start Eclipse which is overkill. Once a week is plenty enough.

You can run a manual update at any time in future by going 'Help' -> 'Software Updates' -> 'Search for updates of currently installed features'

to turn of automatic updates go... 'Window' -> 'Preferences' -> 'Install/Update' -> 'Automatic Updates' and deselect 'Automatically find new updates'

Installing Add-on products/projects

The procedure for installing add-ons is the same for all. You point eclipse at a remote distribution site and it collects and locally installs the required libraries.

Click 'Help' -> Software updates' -> 'Search for new features' Select 'New Remote Site', give it a label and enter one of the project update URLs into the appropriate box, click OK, then 'Finish', enter you proxy username and password. Eclipse will interrogate the remote site and present you with a list of available versions. Choose the latest stable build and click 'Next', accept the license conditions, click 'Finish' and when prompted allow installation of the unsigned application.

see the following sections for URLs of update sites to use in the above process for your chosen language:

Java development

you will pretty much have everything you need from the above install

PHP development

For PHP development there are two options, the 'official' Eclipse PHP developers toolkit (PDT), and the older PHP-Eclipse project:

Perl development

EPIC is the standard plug-in for Perl development

after installing any of these add-ons you will be prompted to restart and should then be able to click a file with the usual language extensions and be shown context-sensitive colour and features for that language.

you'll find libraries and add-ons for other languages and purposes here:

See Also: Web Tools | Web Development | Notes Index