How to Download Eclipse Update Site for Offline Use

Unlike the early Eclipse days, now most of Eclipse plugins are distributed via Update Manager. Installation of new software is only a few clicks away – unless your development environment is not connected to the internet! Some vendors publish update site archives for offline use, but most of them are not. Eclipse tries to provide a solution for that with site mirroring, but is not as easy as it could be and forces you to install full-fledged Eclipse on a machine connected to the internet. So, what can you do about it?

Let’s take run-jetty-run – excellent plugin that allows you to run Jetty in Eclipse with a single click, including source attachment for debugging, – and prepare an offline update site for it.

First, we’ll need wget command line tool. It comes bundled in many (all?) Linux installations, and you can grab Windows version here (take the Setup version of the package, install it and add “C:\Program Files (x86)\GnuWin32\bin” to the PATH variable).

Step 1
Download the RJR update site to your local machine:

C:\Work\RJR>wget --recursive --no-parent http://run-jetty-run.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/updatesite

Note that we want the whole update site, but do not want to climb up the directory tree!

wget

Step 2
Take the content of the downloaded update site and move it to your offline environment.

update-site

Step 3
Now you can open Eclipse and add your offline update site directory to the list of available software sites via “Local…” button.

eclipse

That’s all, enjoy 🙂

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