Best Practice to distribute a Eclipse setup for a project?

Question

I'm looking for some best practices to rollout/setup a complete project setup with Eclipse to my dev team.

It's a maven based project that will work without Eclipse. But we want to distribute a preconfigure Eclipse version that have all plugins installed, we want to have a local update site to rollout update of this setup and so on.

Is there any good way to achieve this kind of setup? I know that i can provide a update site which contain some plugins, but can i define a set of plugins?

Is it possible that Eclipse pmd, Checkstyle, Findbugs and the code formatter use the settings from Maven?

Here are the two most important questions for me:

1. How to define a plugin set for an Eclipse installation, so that all developers have the same set of plugins installed.
2. Any way to use the configurations from pmd, Findbugs, Checkstyle and code formatter from Maven to be used inside eclipse

Answer 1

I had similar issues some time ago. Setting up eclipse with a bunch of plugins is really annoying. proko mentioned a plugin I didn't know, so I compared it to the solution I am using right now. After 15 minutes of installing, trying it out and reading the doc, I gave up because it seems too heavyweighted for my needs.

The solution I am using myself is yatta Profiles: http://profiles.yatta.de

Especially your first requirement can be tackled with it. You can install all the plugins your team needs, click on a button to upload the configuration, and send the link to your team. Your colleagues just have to download your profile. All plugins will be installed automatically.

Here’s a link to an Eclipse profile with the plugins you mentioned (pmd, checkstyle, findbugs, maven): https://marketplace.yatta.de/profiles/a7Ig

Answer 2

Beside of your Eclipse installation via update site, here a possible plugin to manage configurations (question 2):

To distribute any settings of 'window-preference' to your whole dev team I can recomment 'workspace mechanics'.

You can record your settings and then provide them via your dev server.

If you distribute a shared Eclipse it's also easy to provide the proper workspace mechanics URL for any Eclipse installation (see Enterprise Configuration of Workspace mechanic).

Changes to the settings are checked on startup and the developers are always up to date.

Further information can be found on the official project page: https://code.google.com/a/eclipselabs.org/p/workspacemechanic/