Keep correctness of Eclipse workspace with continuous integration

IDE misconfiguration is a big source of inefficient time use in our team. I wanted to know if other teams have tried to check the health of the eclipse workspace with continuous integration. Eclipse is open source and extensible, and most (all?) of its files are in xml. So it should not be difficult to add a step to continuous integration that checks the health of the workspace, such as no missing Jar files, no errors, etc.

What we have is a separate ant script to do the real builds that go to QA and to the customers. This ant script is run with continuous integration and we have put in place a few simple checks that catch most big showstoppers.

The workspace configuration is a different story and we sometimes detect problems when it's too late (the dev left home).

EDIT: Note that we share our Eclipse config files.

Since you are using ant, you can create a custom task that verifies the following files against pre-defined ones. If they don't match, report problem:

workspace/.metadata/*.* (whichever configurations you think are important)
workspace/project/.classpath
workspace/project/.project
workspace/project/.settings/*.* (whichever configurations you think are important)

Of course, these files include some hard-coded paths, so you can use regular expressions in the pre-defined files.

If you want to check only simple things like "the project doesn't compile", then just compile the project in the ant script (using the javac task) and see if there are errors.

Another thing - continuous integration should better be IDE-agnostic. I.e. you must have a IDE-less environment (a CI Engine) that compiles the project. Imagine the following:

three developers, one of them accidentally removed a jar from his Eclipse, but the project in the repository is compiling. No need to report problems in that case
one of the developers adds a new jar and commits. The others have not updated. No problems are reported in there workspaces, although after they update, they might get the problem.

That all said, I think you'd better look at Hudson, which is a continuous integration engine. Thus you won't be dependent on IDE settings for your builds.

-1 but there is no such thing "preconfigured ones".

flybywire 2010-01-21 09:46:45

what will you be checking against then? "There are no missing jars" - which jars can be missing? If the project doesn't compile then that's even easier to catch.

Bozho 2010-01-21 09:48:02

yes, that the project compiles in the IDE would be a good check

flybywire 2010-01-21 09:51:26

then just compile it in the ant task. if you don't know how to do it with <javac, then ask the question that way

Bozho 2010-01-21 09:57:02

@flybywire - it is **RUDE** to downvote an answer to your own question. You do want people to spend the time answering don't you?

Stephen C 2010-01-21 09:57:37

@Bozho, that is exactly the point. I **don't** want to compile it in an ant task, I want to compile it exactly as eclipse would

flybywire 2010-01-21 11:45:29

why? with CI you need to have a "build" as an output. Why do you care that some developer somewhere has screwed up his Eclipse?

Bozho 2010-01-21 11:51:00

@bozho: because all developers share the eclipse project files. If a dev modifies a file so that it depends on library-1.1 instead of library-1.0 and he adds the jar to the project but doesn't commit the new .classpath file we want to know about it as early as possible.

flybywire 2010-01-21 13:27:59

then the question would come - how are you producing your build artifacts?

Bozho 2010-01-21 13:57:24

@Stephen C: It's hardly rude to down-vote your own question's answers. down-vote if not helpful, up-vote if helpful. Simple rules, no sugar on top. I've down-voted some answers on my questions before because they were actively unhelpful and/or missed the point. That's how the site works. People should make an effort to communicate and fix the problem, and try to alleviate the down-vote.

GMan 2010-01-21 15:45:17

(As for the discussion about being rude: see http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/36442/is-it-rude-to-downvote-an-answer-to-your-own-question)

Arjan 2010-01-21 15:46:54

@GMan - indeed. But flybywire didn't communicate the fact that 1. he doesn't have a "stable config files" or that he misunderstands CI ;)

Bozho 2010-01-21 15:50:52

I'm only responding to the blanket statement made by Stephen. There may be cases where it's unacceptable to have down-voted, and cases where it's completely acceptable. Stephen said only the former is possible.

GMan 2010-01-21 16:50:33

@Bozho perhaps the misunderstanding comes from what you and me mean by *config files*. I also include in that concept classpath and project dependencies. Those files are almost never stable - they always change as the project progresses.

flybywire 2010-01-21 18:04:35

because we share our eclipse config files

flybywire 2010-01-21 13:30:22

I cannot recommend strongly enough against it. Use an Eclipse preference file instead which each developer reads when creating a new workspace.

Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen 2010-01-21 14:52:10

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Keep correctness of Eclipse workspace with continuous integration

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