Introduction

Checking out and building JBoss Tools with Eclipse is probably much easier than you think. Read on to see the details.

Note: external plugins like jbpm and drools exists in these projects repositories. These instructions are for the primary jboss tools plugin set.

Please see the JBossToolsCodingGuidelines.

Get the source

The easiest is to just checkout the complete trunk/branch/tag of JBoss Tools you are interested in via command line or your favorite svn client. Using Eclipse to do it is cumbersome since you have to checkout each module individually.

To get committer trunk:

svn co https://svn.jboss.org/repos/jbosstools/trunk

To get anonymous trunk (readonly mirror):

svn co http://anonsvn.jboss.org/repos/jbosstools/trunk

Get Eclipse SDK

If you do not already have it download Eclipse SDK 3.3 and Webtools 2.0 from

. SDK is important since otherwise you do not have the PDE plugins which is needed for plugin development.

The easiest is to get Eclipse JEE which is a full SDK bundle with the required plugins.

Get XULRunner

XULRunner is required for the Visual Page Editor (vpe) components.

Get org.mozilla.xpcom_1.8.1.3-20070904.jar from Mozilla together with the OS specific org.mozilla.xulrunner binary.

These two jars need to be unzipped as directories into your eclipse plugins directory. e.g. org.mozilla.xpcom_1.8.1.3-20070904.jar should be unzipped into eclipse/plugins/org.mozilla.xpcom_1.8.1.3-20070904.

Otherwise you will have compilation errors when import the JBoss Tools project.

Start Eclipse

To be sure Eclipse picks up changes in the plugins directory start eclipse with the -clean command line argument, e.g. eclipse -clean.

Adding -debug can also help since you will get information about which plugins that could not load.

Import JBoss Tools

File > Import > Existing projects into workspace

Set "Select root directory" to the root directory of where you have checked out JBoss Tools.

The Projects lists should now be filled up and you can press Finish to get all of the projects in one simple operation.

When the import is done it will take some time before Eclipse have build all the projects. Be patient

Tip: If there are some plugins with errors and they are from a directory named "legacy" then just remove them since they are not relevant for JBoss Tools functionallity.

Run it

Now you should be able to select a plugin project and click Run As ... > Eclipse Application and you will have an Eclipse with JBoss Tools plugins loaded and ready to be modified as you please.

Contribute patches

If you fix or add something useful create a patch for each of the affected plugins (or use svn command line to do it for the whole trunk) by right clicking on the plugins and choose Team > Create patch.

If you do not have a Team > Create patch available then it is because you do not have an SVN plugin or have not yet enabled svn for the project.

The generated patches you can submit to our JIRA.