I have been working last time in order to
add update mechanism to Eclipse RCP application we have developed in my team. I
must confess I struggled for some time with the P2 mechanism and finally I succeeded
to obtain the expected result: an RCP based application with an automatic self-update
mechanism, using headless build and testable with Jenkins.
Adding self-update to an application is not a ordinary or easy task. There are few examples here,
here, or here.
I tried different solution and there were
always some scenarios that didn’t work properly (headless build did not work as
expected, problems with dependencies in eclipse.equinox.p2.user.ui,
plug-in org.eclipse.equinox.ds not started and the most frustrating the updates were not detected). Therefore, my
colleagues agreed all that P2 mechanism is "unnecessary complicated".
Here are steps that I followed in order to
have the provisioning mechanism working.
- Create a feature-based product (a simple RCP Application to which we will add features)
- Export the product
- Export features to be included in the application
- Install features to the result application. You may add them manually using the Install New Software menu or use a command line or script. For instance you may use:
%eclipse_home%/eclipsec.exe
-application org.eclipse.equinox.p2.director -repository <list_of_comma_separated_repositories>
-installIU <your_feature_group>
-destination <location_of_targeted_product> -profile <profile>
- Modify your bundles and features version number
- Export again the features and deploy them optionally on a web server
- Start your application and check for updates (update sites may be added at he runtime, in the code or using p2.inf file to have pre-defined locations): it should detect the updated features. Additionally, I added headless update at startup as described here
