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Eclipse Update Sites - Part II
Hosting an Eclipse Update Site with Zed Builds And Bugs
As a follow-up to both Eclipse Feature Builds and Eclipse Update Sites it's also important to know that you can use Zed Builds and Bugs to actually host your Eclipse Update Site.
The Zed Builds and Bugs automated build server has an extension in the Zed Configuration File that allows you to host static HTML pages and serve them to users. The options included in this extension allow you to set up a publicly accessible web site. For our purposes, this is exactly what we'll use in order to host the Eclipse Update Site.
Let's take the example where we have installed Zed on a windows system in the default location of C:\Program Files\Hericus\Zed. We want to host the Eclipse Update Site under this location in the folder called EclipseUpdateSite.
When the user points their browser to our Zed server they will get the normal Zed login and the regular application. In order to get to our static content, we need to choose an extra path that they will use in their URL to get access to the static content. To keep things simple, we'll choose the path extension of /update/ for our update site.
Based on the above layout, we need to update the zed.xml configuration file to contain the following section:
<ZedStaticHTML> <ZedCustomHTML path="C:/Program Files/Hericus/Zed/EclipseUpdateSite/" requiresSession="false" url="/update/"/> </ZedStaticHTML>
The Zed server will need to be bounced to pick up this configuration file change, and when it comes back up we will be able to point our web browser to the url http://localhost:8081/update/ and access the files that are included in the directory c:\Program Files\Hericus\Zed\EclipseUpdateSite\ .
If you have multiple releases of a product, or multiple products that all require an Eclipse Update Site, you can use this technique to host all of them via the Zed Builds and Bugs server. You can either nest them all within a single directory and ZedCustomHTML entry, or you can use multiple ZedCustomHTML directives to point to each individual folder that is used.
For further details about the config file see the Zed Configuration File section in the documentation. It will detail how to protect access to the static HTML pages if required, for example.
With all of this in place, you now have full Continuous Integration capabilities for your Eclipse Feature Builds that will take them from source code to update site using just a few simple steps and features of Zed Builds and Bugs.