Minimalist Build of Equinox Http From Source

Building eclipse parts can be pretty hard. There are some great tutorials out there for building the entire platform project Platform Build, Eclipse Target Platform - Tutorial.

However, that’s a huge ~25GB investment. Also, few examples demonstrate building just a subset of the projects in the platform.

As a new committer on only one of the multitude of eclipse platform projects I wanted an easier and simpler build path. This is particularly important when trying to recruite help from developers who might be interested in lending a hand but only in a very specific subset of eclipse platform.

In this case, I’m interested in building equinox http.servlet (and dependencies).

I need:

• the osgi core framework (rt.equinox.framework/bundles/org.eclipse.osgi)
• the osgi service bundle (rt.equinox.framework/bundles/org.eclipse.osgi.services)
• the http.servlet bundle (rt.equinox.bundles/bundles/org.eclipse.equinox.http.servlet)

I also want to make sure I can consume these from a maven repo, so I need to ensure the parent dependencies are setup correctly (i.e. make sure the parent poms are published as well).

Using the following commands I can do just that!

# (optional) Save this in your .profile or .bashrc for reuse, speeds up the build
export MAVEN_OPTS="-Xmx2048m -Declipse.p2.mirrors=false"

# Clone the platform aggregator repo and init the submodules
# Note: we deliberately didn't recurse through the modules
git clone -b master --progress git://git.eclipse.org/gitroot/platform/eclipse.platform.releng.aggregator.git
cd eclipse.platform.releng.aggregator
git submodule init

# since we want to push this into a maven repo we need the eclipse-platform-parent parent pom
cd eclipse-platform-parent/
mvn -N clean install

# get the framework repo
cd ..
git submodule update rt.equinox.framework/

# get the bundles repo
git submodule update rt.equinox.bundles/

# checkout master branch and install the rt.equinox.framework parent pom
cd rt.equinox.framework/
git co master
mvn -N clean install

# build the core framework
cd bundles/org.eclipse.osgi/
mvn -N clean install

# build the compendium services
cd ../org.eclipse.osgi.services/
mvn -N clean install

# now switch to the bundles repo and checkout master branch
cd ../../../rt.equinox.bundles/
git co master

# install the rt.equinox.bundles parent pom
mvn -N clean install

# finally build the http.servlet bundle
cd bundles/org.eclipse.equinox.http.servlet
mvn -N clean install

That’s a mouthfull but once this is done just doing git updates and then rebuilding the individual bundles as needed is all you need to do.