How can I move my dev environment to another PC?

March 16, 2011 9:07 PM

What's the best way to do a complete clone/copy/export/duplicate/mirror/whatever of an Eclipse-based development environment and move it to another PC?

The dev environment at my day job is mainly Eclipse and WAMP. I'm looking to bring a copy of that workspace over to my home desktop.

But the original setup was less than trivial, and the projects have gotten bigger and more complicated since then. Searching around the 'net I find people suggesting you can just copy the workspace over, maybe doing an import at worst. But I find the copypasta method to usually end up either broken or insufficient. The source files themselves are trivial, they can be pulled from SVN. It's all the project settings, eclipse settings, debug/run configurations, plugins, plugin settings, etc, etc...all that mess which can be trickier to get going.

So, does anyone know of a good trick or process for picking up a complicated eclipse setup and getting it going with all the exact same settings/plugins/etc on a new computer? Is it just a matter of finding a dozen different import/export buttons?

posted by nmaster64 to computers & internet (4 answers total)

FAQ: Where are Eclipse preferences stored?
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:17 PM on March 16, 2011

Well, eclipse stores pretty much all of it's settings in either the workspace, and plug ins are stored in the program directory.

So just copy the program directory from wherever it's installed (where eclipse.exe is on windows) an then copy the workspace directory, which will be in your user folder (c:/users/[username] in windows) and you should be good to go.

Shouldn't need any registry hacking or anything like that. You don't even need to re-run the installer, just add a shortcut to eclipse.exe to your start menu.

Oh and you should be using SVN/Git/etc to keep your source code in synch.
posted by delmoi at 4:33 AM on March 17, 2011

Eclipse keeps its configuration in hidden files. .eclipse in your homedir, and in the workspace. If you drag and drop all the files in a workspace, you'll end up missing the dotfiles that store your config. So either turn on hidden files, or move the folder itself. If you have multiple projects open in a single workspace, there's only one settings for that group of projects.
posted by pwnguin at 1:17 PM on March 17, 2011

Well I had no luck backing up settings individually and trying to get things imported into an existing installation of Eclipse (one with some other things already installed I didn't want to lose). However I did have success with copying the entire Eclipse installation over to the new computer in a separate location, and just having two installations and two workspaces.

Of course, getting WAMP and the databases and other external libraries such as Jetty moved over and properly in place and configured was a whole other can of worms.

Subclipse broke after the move however. The .keyring file in the eclipse runtime config folder has to be deleted and eclipse restarted so you can reauthenticate your connections on the new machine. Also, if you use the Eclipse export to backup your projects, it won't do .svn folders, so you are better off backing up via explorer/finder or just rechecking out your projects from the repository.
posted by nmaster64 at 12:53 AM on March 21, 2011