Enterprise Eclipse Provisioning - Or - How to share your standard Eclipse setup with other developers

Question

We use Eclipse as the IDE for developing all sorts of Java/J2EE applications in our 150 people odd IT department. One of the common problems we have been seeing is that developers download and install different versions of Eclipse and plugins based on their personal likes and dislikes.

We have been trying to bring some consistency to this and have standardized on the version and the plugins that developers should be using. So the problem now is how do we distribute this installation to the team. We have zipped the directories and shared it through a shared drive. But I am looking for a better solution using some kind of provisioning tool for Eclipse using which people can install the IDE or get updates.

Has anyone faced this problem? What are your solutions to this? How do you ensure a standard Eclipse environment across developers?

I found Yoxos as a potential solution to this. Does anyone have any experience with it? Can p2 be used to do this?

Answer 1

Our solution is currently a non-freware one, based on Nexus Pro.

Since it supports p2 repositories as well as well as the ability to combine multiple Eclipse update sites into a single URL, we are using that last feature to propose one URL per project, each one referencing the right set of plugins for each project.

Answer 2

You can create your own composite p2 repository and use p2 installer to bootstrap Eclipse from there. Alternatively you could use one of the commercial tools, such as Yoxos, Pulse or Nexus.