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Getting Started

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Nick Chen edited this page Nov 12, 2016 · 16 revisions

Learn about Git

If you are new to Git and GitHub, you might consider completing this interactive tutorial or this guide from GitHub.

Learn about Eclipse Development

If you are new to Eclipse RCP and RAP development, you might consider purchasing a copy of Eclipse Plug-ins 3rd Edition.

Set up Eclipse for Development

We are using Eclipse Mars 4.5 as our target platform. As long as we are not using any special features, we should be able to easily support all Eclipse 4.x versions. We are no longer able to support the older Eclipse 3.x versions. Eventually, the goal is to migrate completely to the E4 Platform.

You should download the Eclipse IDE for RCP and RAP Developers from http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/packages/eclipse-rcp-and-rap-developers/mars2.

Regardless of which version of Eclipse you use, ensure that you are building with Java 8.

Install Maven Connector

The Force.com IDE uses Tycho as its build system. Tycho is maven-centric. Unfortunately, Eclipse has some issues with certain lifecycles in Maven. To make those lifecycles work, we need to install some connectors that adapt them.

  1. In Eclipse, navigate to Preferences > Maven > Discovery.
  2. Click on the "Open Catalog" button. m2e discovery
  3. Search for "Tycho" and select it. Tycho Connector
  4. Follow the installation instructions and, when prompted, restart Eclipse.

Import Projects

  1. Clone this repository.
  2. Create a new workspace for working with the Force.com IDE. This ensures that you can set up a new Target Platform for the plug-ins and not interfere with your other projects.
  3. In Eclipse, choose File > Import > General > Existing Projects into Workspace. Import the projects from your cloned Git repository.

Select all of the projects from this ide.core repository. These are the plug-ins that power the Force.com IDE. If you are an internal committer, you should have access to other repositories such as ide.test, ide.build, etc.

Install Dependencies

This step ensures that you are only referencing plug-ins and features that are available in Eclipse 4.5 (and not something that's only available in a later version of Eclipse). For more information see PDE/Target Definition.

  1. Open the file com.salesforce.ide.targetdefinition.external.target in Eclipse.
  2. Wait patiently for the list of plug-ins and features to refresh. You must let this step complete before you proceed. You can monitor the progress in the bottom right corner of your screen.
  3. Once list has finished refreshing, click the Set as Target Platform link in the upper right corner of the editor (see screenshot below). This will import the necessary prerequisite plug-ins for you. This takes about 5 minutes.
  4. At this point, the workspace will build successfully, albeit with many warnings. You might notice that we are importing some plug-ins (such as SWTBot) that are not directly referenced from ide.core. That's correct. These are the plug-ins that are required for the tests in the other projects.

Set as target platform

Launch the Force.com IDE

  1. In Eclipse, choose Run > Debug Configurations...
  2. You should see the ForceComIDE launch configuration (see screenshot below).
  3. Launch the IDE in debug more.

Launch Force.com IDE

Building an external version

  1. Ensure that you have Maven 3 installed.
  2. Open a terminal.
  3. In the directory where you cloned ide.core, issue mvn clean package -Dexternal=true. The first time you do this, it will take a long time (around 20 minutes), where Maven attempts to download all the required packages.
  4. After the previous step completes, you have an installable set of plug-ins at com.salesforce.ide.repository.external/target/repository

Here is a screencast that illustrates the steps:

Launch Force.com IDE

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