Thursday, February 7, 2019

Changing the default ".eclipse" and "p2" folder location in Eclipse IDE

Many of us have been using Eclipse IDE since we started developing programs in variety of languages but as a developer we never bothered the internals of it

Well there is so much into it, If we start talking the internals of eclipse IDE, it takes almost our lifetime to know it all.

What we discuss here is a tiny piece of information from the universe of eclipse, but worth knowing it

This post will give you some hints on changing the ".eclipse" folder and "p2" folders which you normally find at the user home directory

for discussion, let me take ECLIPSE-PHOTON as lab rat, you can have any major distribution of eclipse and try it. If you ask me I would suggest two major distributions back since photon would be appropriate and all other distributions there after since photon

The reason which made me write this post was, I was pulled to a situation during development where I should maintain different locations for such folders, as I was searching web, I encountered there were lot of people having the same problem or the requirement as I did.

Ok lets jump into the pool...

You can download Eclipse - Photon form the link below to try it or the Eclipse of your choice

Direct Link : Eclipse Photon Download

Eclipse Photon requires java-1.8 or higher to operate, so make sure you have java installed and appropriate environment variables are set accordingly....

i.e JAVA_HOME and PATH

Extract the eclipse-jee-photon-R-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz file to your preferred location.

Now open a terminal and navigate to the CONFIGURATION folder as given below...
> cd <eclipse-photon-home-directory>/configuration
In the above mentioned folder you will have a file named "config.ini"

Open config.ini file in your favourite text editor(I prefer VI-Improved, simply vim) and include a configuration property at the bottom of the file
osgi.configuration.area=<preffered-location-of-your-choice>/.eclipse

Well that's it... Now you can start eclipse and check the folder you mentioned in the config property "osgi.configuration.area", I bet you would find two folders as said in the title....
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Hey forgot to tell you about another parameter which can be used to change the default WorkSpace location when the eclipse starts

this parameter can be found in the file "eclipse.ini" at location <eclipse-photon-home-directory>/

The parameter which decides the default workspace location is "osgi.instance.area.default" 

You can change the value of this parameter to any of your preferred location as your workspace

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