Headless Build for Beginners - part V

Headless building Update Site

There is no easy way to achieve this. There have been some discussions in past and the Build and Test Automation article too touched it in brief. But its all hacky. I tried various stuff but the closest I could get was build features and plug-ins using (mentioned in) a site.xml and generating the metadata for them. The site.xml can be placed with them manually but I could not find a way to (automatically) update the site.xml with the feature and plug-ins build qualifiers. (There are always hacks like having a dummy site.xml and do a find-replace in it. Or write a custom ant task that emits XML for ste.xml - none of the hack is very maintainable or scalable)

After more investigation I realized may be I was trying to solve the wrong problem. We really don't need the update site (not if you are using Eclipse 3.4 or later). A p2 repository is not only easy to generate but is also the recommended way of distributing features and plug-ins.

Headless building a p2 repository

Now a p2 repo can be generated either from a bunch of features and plug-ins or directly from a product configuration. Both explained in Eclipse help. We will here take a product configuration and build a p2 repository for it. The setup will be same as discussed before. However this time, we will copy all the files from /org.eclipse.pde.build/templates/headless-build folder to our build configuration folder (build\buildConfiguration). Thus, the build structure will now looks like this

<buildConfigurationDirectory>
       allElements.xml
       build.properties
       customAssembly.xml
       customTargets.xml
<buildDirectory>
       plugins/
              com.example.helloworld
              com.example.product
                     example.product
       features/
              com.example.helloworld.feature

The current setup will generate the product when build. We now need to add a hook for repository generation. This can be done in customAssembly.xml. Open it in Eclipse or your favorite text editor and make the following changes in post.gather.bin.parts target.

<target name="post.gather.bin.parts">
 <p2.publish.featuresAndBundles
  repository="file:/${buildDirectory}/repository"
  source="${buildDirectory}/tmp/${archivePrefix}" 
  compress="true"
 >
 </p2.publish.featuresAndBundles>
</target>       

Note that p2.publish.featuresAndBundles is just of the of ant task that can be used to generate metadata. There are more for different situations. The idea here was more to see how to add custom call in ant scripts.

Run the build as before

java -jar c:\eclipse\plugins\org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.1.0.v20100507.jar -application org.eclipse.ant.core.antRunner -buildfile c:\eclipse\plugins\org.eclipse.pde.build_3.6.0.v20100603\scripts\productBuild\productBuild.xml -Dbuilder=c:\build\buildConfiguration

This will create a p2 metadata repository in file:/${buildDirectory}/repository folder. You can control the location using repository property.