Adding a plugin or feature to Maven

The steps for adding a plug-in (one small part of IBEX, such as the blocks view) or feature (a larger collection of plug-ins, such as CSS) to the maven build are below:

Step by step:

  • Add the plug-in to feature.base:

    • Open feature.xml in uk.ac.stfc.isis.ibex.feature.base

    • Go to “Included Plug-ins” (or “Included Features”) tab and click “Add…”

    • Find your new plug-in in the list and add it

  • Add the plug-in to ibex.product

    • Open ibex.product in uk.ac.stfc.isis.ibex.e4.client.product

    • Go to “Configuration” tab and click “Add…” next the “Start Levels” section

    • Find your new plug-in in the list and add it

  • Add the plug-in to feature.base:

    • Open feature.xml in uk.ac.stfc.isis.ibex.feature.base

    • Go to “Included Plug-ins” tab and click “Add…”

    • Find your new plug-in in the list and add it

  • Convert the plug-in to a Maven project.

    • Right-click on the plug-in and select Configure > Convert to Maven Project

    • Click “Finish”. This should create a pom.xml inside the project.

  • Add the new plug-in to the Parent POM

    • Select the pom.xml file in uk.ac.stfc.isis.ibex.client.tycho.parent

    • On the overview tab click “Add…” under the Modules section

    • Select the new plug-in from the list

    • Enable the “Update POM parent section in selected projects” option and click “OK”

    • Save it

  • Edit the plug-in pom.xml file

    • Select the pom.xml file

    • Open the pom.xml tab

    • Change/add the packaging to eclipse-plugin (or eclipse-test-plugin if it’s a unit test plugin)

    • Remove the build section

    • Remove the groupID and version entries outside of parent

    • Save it

Example POM

An example of what the plug-in POM should look like:

    <project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
      <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
      <artifactId>tychodemo.bundle.tests</artifactId>
      <packaging>eclipse-plugin</packaging>
      <parent>
            <groupId>CSS_ISIS</groupId>
            <artifactId>parent</artifactId>
            <version>1.0.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
            <relativePath>../tychodemo.parent</relativePath>
      </parent>
    </project>