Vasanth Dharmaraj’s Blog

I always work with the latest integration build of Eclipse. So naturally I update my eclipse quite frequently. This becomes a pain if you are using a lot of plugins like me. So I googled and found a way to have your plugins in a separate folder.

Here is how to do it:
1. Create a folder called ‘links’ in your eclipse directory.
2. Create a file with the extension .link, say plugins.link.
3. Open the file and add a line ‘path=c:\\myplugins’ and save the file.
4. Create the directory mentioned in the link file. (c:\myplugins)
5. Create a sub directory named ‘eclipse’ in the above directory. (c:\myplugins\eclipse)
6. Create a couple of sub directories named ‘features’ and ‘plugins’ in the above directory. (c:\myplugins\eclipse\features & c:\myplugins\eclipse\plugins)
7. Now put all the third party plugins in these directories.
8. (Re)start eclipse and voilà all the plugins in the separate directory are loaded.

Now when updating eclipse you can delete all files and folders other than the ‘links’ and unzip the new eclipse build. As easy as that. Well almost there is another folder called ‘workspace’ in the eclipse folder. You would want to retain this folder to preserve all the configuration and project information. There is a easy solution for this too. When starting up eclipse use the following command line parameter to specify an alternate location for your ‘workspace’

 eclipse.exe -data c:\myworkspace

Be sure to move the contents of the previous workspace location to prevent losing all the settings and projects.

Disclaimer: I have tested this only on windows 2000. Be sure to back up all your data before proceeding.

Related posts:

1. Eclipse Plugin: eclipse2ant
2. Eclipse Plugin Central & http://www.eclipse-plugins.info/
3. Eclipse Plugins You Can’t Live Without
4. EclipsePlus: Eclipse bundled with open source plugins
5. Eclipse 3.0 M5 released