Update Site Creation Automation

Question

Hi,

I've developed an eclipse plug in, and created a feature and an update site projects inside eclipse to publish it. What i am looking for, is a way to automate the process of creating my update site during our automatic build process through a command line rather that manually throught the UI of the update site project.

It seems to me that large projects must use an automated process, and that it should be quite straightforward, but didn't find any simple reference on how to do it in the web.

Thank a lot in advance! Michal.

Answer 1

You may want to try using Maven 2 with a plugin for this sort of thing. It sounds to me like a plugin for exactly this sort of thing should already exist. If not, you could create a maven plugin yourself. There's instructions and documentation on the Apache Maven website for how to do this. I should warn you that, having made a couple Maven plugins myself, you should be prepared to spend at least 5 or 6 hours learning how to write the plugin, and then actually writing it. Alternatively, if you're using ant, you could write an Ant Task to do the same job, or plugin for whichever other build system you may be using.

Answer 2

What you need is to do a "PDE Build". Google the term and you'll find plenty of information, guides, articles and what not. Start with the Eclipse built-in help, under Plugin Development Environment Guide -> Tasks you will find the basic articles that will get you started.

AFAIK, there is one small catch. The current release can generate all the P2 metadata that you need but not a proper site.xml. This is the simplest issue, it can be easily generated with a simple code.