How to make your Eclipse plugin list survive an Eclipse upgrade

Submitted by Falken on

If you are playing around with the Linux version of Flex Builder, CFEclipse, or generally mucking about with your Eclipse, or need to upgrade to a new Eclipse version, you've no doubt been annoyed at the way this removes all your carefully installed plug-ins.
Fortunately there is a way to keep them across Eclipse re-installs.

All you need to do is create a few magic directories and one file:

# mkdir -p ~/eclipse-plugins/eclipse/features
# mkdir -p ~/eclipse-plugins/eclipse/plugins
# cat ~/eclipse-plugins/eclipse/.eclipseextension
name=My Eclipse Plugins
id=my.eclipse.plugins
version=1.0.0
#

Then in Eclipse itself, go to Help, Updates, Manage.
Right click the top of the tree, and choose Add, Extension location.
Pick the directory you created above.
Eclipse will want to restart so your should probably let it.

The next time you install a new plug-in, make sure on the final install screen you change the 'installation directory'.

The next time you have to blow away Eclipse, you can just re-add the extension location to get all the plug-ins installed into it back, hurrah !

Submitted by feliduca (not verified) on Mon, 09/29/2008 - 21:34

Permalink

I've been using MyEclipse + Flex Builder 2 plugin, as well as a bunch 
of other plugins (RadRails, Database Explorer, SVN, etc) for about 6 
months. 

The makers of MyEclipse tell me they don't officially support Flex 
Builder. So when I eventually upgrade to FB3, I'm considering 
installing the FB3 application by itself. 

Since FB3 is based on Eclipse, can I then recreate my existing 
development environment by installing the other plugins mentioned above?

Hi,

I'm using MyEclipse from last few months.Now i want to install Flex plugin into MyEclipse6. I downloaded the Flex plugin for My Eclipse.But while installing it's showing a message like Uncompatable Eclipse with this...Please help me to solve this.

Thanks

Jayavardhan

Thanks for sharing this info. Installing the eclipse flex plugin indeed ruined my SVN (subclipse) install. I removed flex, reinstalled subclipse, created the dirs and file you said to, reinstalled flex and svn is still working! Cheers, Oren