Branded Eclipse Example

Build an own, branded eclipse with a couple of plugins already installed an selected.

Download

Prepackaged eclipse archives can be downloaded here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/custom-eclipse/files/

How-To create eclipse yourself

  1. Make sure, you have the necessary utilities installed: apt-get install zip unzip tar sed java svn wget git bash.
  2. Clone this repository: git clone https://github.com/adangel/custom-eclipse
  3. Review create-mirror.sh and comment/uncomment the update sites you want to mirror
  4. Execute bash create-mirror.sh
  5. Drink coffee. This can take a while. If every update site is enabled, you'll download about 5 gigabytes. All the downloaded stuff will be placed under temp/. Under temp/p2-mirror is a merged p2 repository which contains all the artifacts of the mirrored repositories.
  6. Have a look at the module "branding". This is a eclipse plugin which brings
    • A splash screen. Replace "splash-base.bmp" with your own.
    • The project uses "splasher-maven-plugin". Update the property splash-subtitle in the top-level pom.xml file.
    • Icons. Replace icon*.* with your own.
    • About dialog in eclipse. See plugin.xml/plugin.properties for details. See also about.gif for the logo in the about dialog.
  7. Have a look at "feature/feature.xml". This selects hopefully all the features, that come with the default Eclipse JEE bundle. You can add/remove features and plugins.
  8. Have a look at "feature-plugins/feature.xml". This selects all additional features/plugins from external sites that have been mirrored.
  9. Have a look at the top-level pom.xml file. You can specify for which platforms you want to create an own eclipse distribution. See the plugin "target-platform-configuration" and the environments configuration.
  10. Execute mvn clean package. The result is stored under "distribution/target/products/".
  11. Last step: Execute fix-eclipse-ini.sh. This will change the absolute paths to the java agents in "eclipse.ini" to relative ones and repackage the eclipse archives and also removes the wrong (default) splash screen.
  12. The final result is still stored under "distribution/target/products/".

Starting Eclipse

The created eclipse distribution contains two javaagents: lombok and optimizer-for-eclipse. If eclipse doesn't start, you maybe need to adjust the paths in eclipse.ini.

Plugins

For the list of plugins, see create-mirror.sh.

Highlights are:

Note: not all packages are enabled by default.

References