Good solutions to distribute a pre-configured Eclipse?

Question

I am working with a medium team of developers. So far, everyone has its own version of Eclipse, configured with a slightly different set of plugins and with different configuration options. It is normally a pain to set up a new computer as we have to hunt for a bunch of different plugins and configure everything by hand.

Is there a way to create a software distribution that contains:

• A preconfigured set of plugins
  • Subclipse
  • Checkstyle (Configured)
  • Formatting styles and suggestions
  • ..etc...
• Custom perspectives
• Pre-configured repositories for source code
• Pre-configured projects
• A preconfigured workset with locations to retrieve the source code from

In an ideal situation, a person just unzips a file, clicks on the Eclipse icon and voila!, everything is just there.

Answer 1

The way we do it is simply keep a configured version in a SVN repository and we have a shell script that does any configurations we can't do in the repository. To install, checkout and run the shell script. This also allows us to apply reasonable configuration changes to all future installations with a simple checkin.

Answer 2

I've been checking out the Yoxos-on-demand tool:

http://ondemand.yoxos.com/

It looks extremely nice as it contains some additional Yoxos plugins that allow you to pre-configure many options on the tool, with an option that it's called provisioning.

It is possible to pre-configure many options on the team, checkstyle, and properties settings.

I found also an option that, from an existing Yoxos setup, it is possible to export all the settings and import them into another Yoxos installation.

Answer 3

You can have a look at :

http://www.poweredbypulse.com/

Especially at the community-edition, which enables to define centralized Eclipse configurations and manage them.