Deploying a newly developed Eclipse Plugin

Question

I have written an Eclpise plugin (an Error Parser for the CDT), and it works just fine in the debugger version of eclipse. However I cannot for the life of me figure out how to install the plugin into eclipse. I can export the plugin as a jar file, and it seems to export without errors. I put the plugin jar file into eclipse\dropins and it is not loaded by eclipse. If I add it to the plugins directory, no luck. The features directory also seems to ignore my plugin.

So I thought, OK, I'll try installing it through the GUI. So I browse to where the plugin archive is and add it as a local update site, but eclipse complains there is no plugin there.

I'm frustrated. Please help.

Answer 1

Putting the plugin into the eclipse/plugins folder should work. If it doesn't, that usually means Eclipse has cached the plugins configuration for performance reasons. You can force Eclipse to rescan the plugins directory for changes by starting it with the -clean command-line argument.

The typical deployment mechanism for Eclipse is to use features. A feature includes plugins (in your case, probably just one), and can be installed through the Eclipse update manager. To deploy your plugin using a feature, you would do the following:

1. Create a feature project, and add your plugin to the feature using the feature editor.
2. Create an update site project, and add your feature to the update site, using the update site editor.
3. Build the update site. This creates a site.xml file, a features folder, and a plugins folder.

You should then be able to point the Eclipse update manager at the folder or URL containing the site.xml, and install your plugin that way. The advantage of this approach is you can upload the files to a website and deploy remotely.