Tuesday 30 September 2014

Install Plugins from .zip Eclipse

Sometime, Eclipse doesn't exactly update quickly from update sites for installing plugins. This could be a problem especially when you're stuck behind a proxy! So, here's a way to manually install a plugin from a zip.
Note that most plugin writers don't always include the zip, in that case, you may have to try alternate methods to obtain it.

So these are the steps involved in manually installing the plugin-

1. First unzip the file. If the unzipped folder contains content.jar and artifacts.jar, you must be able to import it directly into eclipse from | Help > Install New Software > Add > Archive | .
2. If the above method fails, which happened in my case, unzip the file into a directory and move the directory into /path/to/eclipse/dropins directory. Name of the unzipped folder does not matter.
3. After moving the folder there, restart your eclipse and the plugin must be working now!

You can verify that the plugin is installed by doing | Help > About Eclipse > Installation Details > Installed Software |.

Hope this helps!

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