Sharing a workspace for many developers in Eclipse

Question

How can I share a workspace in Eclipse (Helios or Indigo) so that many developers are able to work in one project?

I know about SVN but I don\'t want to use that.

Answer 1

The workspace will be locked if one instance of Eclipse is running on it. The second instance of Eclipse cannot open the same workspace. This means if you really what to share workspace directly among developers, then they cannot work simultaneously.

Answer 2

Use mounted(shared) dir as a project source dir and click F5 from time to time. Should work if group of developers is small enough. Workspace could be used by only one instance of eclipse (it holds file-based lock).

Answer 3

I admit, this question is pretty old. I still think, it’s worth answering, because I think you are not alone with your question.

As others already mentioned, you need to distinguish between sharing the workspace and sharing the source code in this workspace.

If you want to share your source code, you should use a version control system like Git. GitHub or Bitbucket offer easy solutions for this task.

If you want to share your workspace settings, you can have a look at http://profiles.yatta.de. With this tool, you can share your workspace settings, and others can install a copy of your workspace on their computer.

Answer 4

The workspace concept is absolutely not designed to be shared by multiple instance of Eclipse. I think it is a really bad idea to try to do that.

If you want developpers to collaborate on the same code base, you have to share the Eclipse projects whatever the sharing media (network filesystem, SCM, ...). Then each developpers must import the shared projects in their local workspaces (without copying them locally).

Now if you have some configuration to share to all developpers, you should make those configurations on the project preferences insteand of setting them for the local workspace.

Answer 5

Most common you dont want to share the workspace, because people uses different versions of Eclipse/Netbeans with different settings, instead you want to separate the code and the workspace.

Most common you have the source code in a version tool like SVN or even better Mercurial or Git. You then checkout the source code and import it into your eclipse workspace (but dont store it in the workspace). If you dont want to use a version tool you cant merge files which has been edited by two developers at the same time, without a lot of work.

If you think SVN is a to big setup check out Mercurial, it is much easier and you can very simple setup a rep, a very good mac version is MacHg.

cheers

Answer 6

You should absolutely use source control, whether it be SVN, Git, or something else. This is definitely going to be the best way to manage your project and prevent your developers from stepping on each others toes.

Can you explain your opposition to source control?

If you really are looking for a quick solution, how about just having the project in a shared network folder. One person can set up the project in that location, and the .project file (and others) will be created in that directory. Then each developer, on his or her own workstation will have an installation of Eclipse. They can then 'import' the existing project from the shared folder. This will mean that all developers are editing the same files at the same time. It will work, but you will have issues if two people try editing the same files at the same time (one person's edits will surely be lost). Source control exists to avoid issues like this.

EDIT: Note the distinction between sharing a project and sharing a workspace. You cannot share a workspace between multiple people; each developer should have his or her own workspace locally saved on their computers. You can share a project, which each separate workspace will point to.