Eclipse Platform Plug-in Development Environment Guide
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Building an RCP application from a product configuration file

PDE Build comes with infrastructure to build a complete RCP application from a product configuration file. Most of the setup necessary for such a build can be done through a few modifications to the template build.properties provided in PDE build. The following section focuses on setting up a simple product build assuming that all plug-ins and features (both to build and pre-built) referenced by the product file are already locally available on disk.

Basic setup

The first step in setting up a build is to create the directory in which the build will take place. This directory will be referred to as the build directory and will contain the plug-ins and features to build as well as all the generated artifacts. Next, copy your plug-ins and features respectively into "plugins" and "features" subdirectories. Your product configuration file is expected to be in one of these plugins/features.

The second step in setting up a build is to copy the template build.properties file from org.eclipse.pde.build/templates/headless-build to a new directory which will be the build configuration directory (also referred to as the configuration directory). Edit the copied build.properties file and set the following properties:

• product: the location of your product configuration file in the form "/<plugin or feature id>/path/to/.product"
• baseLocation:  the location of an eclipse install containing all the pre-built features and plug-ins that your product requires in features/ and plugins/ subdirectories.  The RCP delta pack (it is available from the eclipse download page) is mandatory as it includes the org.eclipse.platform.launchers feature which contains the launchers and root files necessary for a product.
• buildDirectory:  the directory the build will take place in.  Set this to the full path of the build directory created previously.
• configs: list the configurations for which you want your product to be built. You can uncomment the configuration(s) provided (be careful of the line continuations).
• archivePrefix: the name of the directory of your product once installed on disk.

Overview of the directory structure

<buildDirectory>/
	plugins/
		pluginToBuildA
		pluginToBuildB
			myProduct.product
		...
	features/
		featureToBuild
		...


<buildConfiguration>/
	build.properties


<baseLocation>
	plugins/
		org.eclipse.core.runtime
		org.eclipse.ui
		...
	features/
		org.eclipse.rcp
		org.eclipse.platform.launchers
		...
		

Running the build

To run the build you will use the org.elipse.ant.core.antRunner application. When invoking eclipse with this application to perform a build you need to set two arguments on the command line:

• -buildfile </path/to/productBuild.xml>:  This is the path to the productBuild.xml provided by pde build.  It is located in the org.eclipse.pde.build/scripts/productBuild directory.  This is the build file that drives the whole product build process.
• -Dbuilder=</path/to/configuration folder>:  This is the path to the build configuration folder.

Run the antRunner application using the following command:

Advanced scenarios

Behind the scenes this setup will generate a feature containing the plugins or features specified in your product configuration file.  This generated feature is then used to drive a normal feature based headless build. If you require more customization of the build, ie fetching from a repository, see the Advanced PDE Build topics for more information.