How to share Eclipse configuration over different workspaces

Question

I\'m using Eclipse (PDT) as primary IDE on different machines. (like at home, laptop, in office, etc.). How could I share the Eclipse and project configuration pragmatically

Answer 1

Another option is export/import:

1. From your existing workspace, File->Export...->General->Preferences, check Export all, and choose file to save them to (prefs.epf for example)
2. Startup Eclipse in a new workspace, File->Import...->General->Preferences , choose your file (prefs.epf), check import all

That worked great for the original author of this tip: he had his code formatting, code style, svn repos, jres preferences imported.

Edit: On Eclipse Juno this works poorly. Some preferences silently do not carry over such as save actions.

Answer 2

Sharing eclipse specific settings across workspaces:

1. Go to ${old_workspace}/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime/.settings
2. Copy everything under the above directory to ${new_workspace}/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime/.settings

This is going to make sure that the ${new_workspace} is having the same configuration as the ${old_workspace}

Hope this helps. Update in case of any issues.

Answer 3

You can actually set many project specific settings that can be checked into source control. For small projects, this works really well. For larger projects, we decided to have a single file that we used for all of our projects and checked into a separate "assets" project that maintained things that developers needed to get started working on our project. This also included things like licenses and other required files.

Answer 4

Simply copy the directories

${old_workspace}/.metadata/.plugins

from an existing project to the new one.

That worked well within (rather simple) PHP projects.

Answer 5

You can use Eclipstyle to clone preferences of one workspace to your other workspaces. You can also export your preferences and clone them later.

Answer 6

i had the same problem.

my approach: storing project data in a directory managed by owncloud

The Project X is created at workstation A, with a custom path pointing to a new sub directory of my ownCloud hierarchy. The default workspace is still residenting on the file system of A.

When I'm sitting at workstation B I open the default local workspace (local on B) and create a new project using the existing sources in the "synchronized" ownCloud directory.

Just click refresh any time you fire up eclipse and you have the current project data. Synchronisation runs in the background automagically, so take care when you have finished working to close eclipse and give ownCloud a chance for uploading the new files to the ownCloud server.

Tomcat or other Servers are running local, the config is copied manually between the machines via scp. This happens only if there are changes in the server setup, which is not very often.

I had no compatibility problems using NEON 2 (arch linux) & NEON 3 (download an running on debian stretch) with different JDK's yet.

Best regards Armin