Last time we talked about how the new 2.1.1 release of Zed Builds and Bugs makes it easy to automate your Eclipse plugin builds. Following on with that theme, we'll show you this time how you can use Zed to take the compiled and packaged plugins and deploy them automatically to an Eclipse Update Site to publish your plugins.

Only a single build step is require to publish your eclipse feature as an update site, but before we get into the details of how to use it, we need to go back over the part about packaging your plugins as a set of features.

Eclipse plugin projects are typically grouped into feature sets so that it is easy to gather and distribute eclipse plugins as collections rather than as individual files or folders. This is especially important when working with an update site, as the update site deals with everything at the feature set level rather than at the plugin level. So in order to publish your plugs via an update site, you have to arrange them into a feature within your development environment first.

Once you have your feature, plugins, and have automated the plugin build for them, you can take the next step of adding the Eclipse Update Step to your build. When you do this, you'll see the following screen that will capture the details of how you want your feature published:

This step looks similar to the Eclipse Feature Build that we talked about previously, but is targeted to help you create your update site quickly and easily. Fill in the following fields:

• Feature Name This is the Eclipse feature that you would like to copy to an eclipse update site. It must have already been compiled correctly.
• Feature Category This is the name of your Feature Category and will be added to your site.xml file.
• Description This describes your Feature Category and will be added to your site.xml file.
• Update Site Root This is the full path to your eclipse update site. You may use build replacement variables for this setting.
• Create If Missing If the path defined by the Update Site Root field is missing, the Zed server will attempt to create it.
• Delete Update Site Contents Before Deploying If you are not sharing your update site folder with other projects, this can be a good way of ensuring that only the latest compiles are published to the update site.
• Site Description This is the overall description of your Eclipse update site. It will be set in the site.xml file.
• Error if Include Plugins Missing This allows you to trigger a build step error if any of the plugins defined by your Feature are missing. Sometimes you don't want this, and want to allow your Feature to be published even if some of the included features are missing.
• Error if Included Features Missing Eclipse Features can reference other Features. When this happens, a dependency chain is built up for each referenced feature. This option allows you to cause the build step to fail if anything in the dependency chain is missing. Sometimes you want to allow for missing features, though, and this option gives you that capability.
• Extra Files to Copy Sometimes you have files or plugins that you would also like to have copied over to the update site. This area gives you a free-form list of items that you would also like to have included in the copy process to build your update site.

Once you have finished defining the layout of your update site, save the build step, and your build will automatically create an Eclipse update site for you every time it runs.