Jun 01 2010

Generating p2 meta data from command line

Published by Radoslaw Urbas at 9:15 pm under Eclipse,IT,Java

Many times when working with Eclipse RCP I had to generate ad-hoc updatesites (usually containing some 3rd party plug-ins). What I usually did to achieve this (with Eclipse IDE):

  • create new feature project
  • add plug-ins to the feature
  • create new updatesite project
  • add the feature to the updatesite (pre-p2 style – site.xml)
  • export newly created updatesite (letting Eclipse to deal with creating p2 meta data)

Since I needed to automate this process I started researching on p2 capabilities and found out that it can be done from command line using FeatureAndBundlesPublisher application. Sample command line invocation to do it:

%ECLIPSE_EXE% -application org.eclipse.equinox.p2.publisher.FeaturesAndBundlesPublisher -metadataRepository file:/%P2_TARGET% -artifactRepository file:/%P2_TARGET% -source %P2_SRC% -compress -configs win32.win32.x86 -publishArtifacts

Where:

  • ECLIPSE_EXE – points to Eclipse executable;
  • P2_TARGET – path to an empty directory where p2 repository should be created;
  • P2_SRC – path to the directory with /plugins subdirectory and plug-ins to be published (jar files) inside;
  • -compress parameter is optional. It compresses artifacts.xml and content.xml to jar (zip) files.

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4 responses so far

4 Responses to “Generating p2 meta data from command line”

  1. # Lars Vogelon 02 Jun 2010 at 5:42 am

    Thank you for the enty. p2 seems to have lots of cool (hidden) features.

  2. # Xavieron 02 Jun 2010 at 12:44 pm

    Thank you it is very useful.

    Now I am looking for a solution to update the p2 target without overwrite it. Any idea ?

  3. # Radoslaw Urbason 02 Jun 2010 at 1:00 pm

    @Xavier Adding -append option should do the trick.

  4. # Xavieron 02 Jun 2010 at 2:05 pm

    Thank you, it works fine.

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