ICE Build Instructions

ICE is relatively easy to build from scratch if you know where to start. This article assumes that you have already collected the ICE Third Party Dependencies and have them in your workspace or stored on your system. Unlike the binary distribution of ICE, all third-party dependencies are required to build ICE from scratch.

Tooling

Building ICE will work out of the box with Eclipse Luna since it has both the EGit and M2E (Maven) plugins installed by default. You may have to install these plugins manually if you are using an older version of Eclipse.

Getting ICE from Git

The first step is checking ICE out from its Git repository. The preferred way to do this is to use Eclipse and clone the Git repo. The Git repository is at http://github.com/eclipse/ice. Open the Git Repositories view ('Window > Show View > Other > Git > Repositories') and choose to clone a repository. Point the wizard to the ICE Git repo and hit Next.

The ICE Git repo needs to be cloned into your workspace so that it can run its build properly. If your workspace is at $HOME/workspace, the repo should be stored at $HOME/workspace/ice as shown in the next picture.

Be sure to check the box that says "Import all existing projects after clone is finished." This will automatically import all Eclipse ICE projects into your workspace (and possibly even a designated working set) and save you quite a bit of time and prevent you from having to learn how the repo is laid out.

Building ICE Binaries using Maven

ICE is built using the Maven build system and Eclipse Tycho. ICE uses Maven and Tycho to create binaries for multiple platforms and architectures as well as executing the test plugins. The Maven build system can be launched by command line using the mvn command, if it is installed, or from within Eclipse using the m2e Eclipse plugin.

On the Command Line

Once Maven is installed, open a terminal window and change your current directory to the ice/org.eclipse.ice.build/ directory within your ICE workspace. Next, execute the following two statements in order:

mvn -N install
mvn install 

The first command downloads and installs the required dependencies, which may take several minutes to complete, and it installs the ICE "parent" build configuration in your local Maven repository. The second command builds the ICE source and test bundles, executes the tests, and creates binaries if the tests pass. This may take a very long time if it is the first time you are building ICE, because Maven will download a lot of other plugins that it needs to build Eclipse RCP applications and to bootstrap itself. However, subsequent builds take about seven to twelve minutes on high-end and low-end systems respectively.

If you don't want to build ICE from files stored within your Eclipse workspace or if you downloaded the entire trunk directory from the repository, you can still build ICE. You can use the same commands to build with this script, and it should produce the same results. The ICE Dev Team uses both: we build from inside Eclipse while we are developing and before we commit to make sure the tests work, and we use an automated Hudson build that runs hourly on our development server.

Inside Eclipse

In order to build ICE binaries from Eclipse, you must use the Eclipse plugin for Maven. Once the plugins are checked out from the repository, open the org.eclipse.ice.build package. We need to follow the same steps as listed above, but in Eclipse there is no way to just execute a command like mvn -N install.

Instead, we need to create a custom run configuration. Right-click on the pom.xml file, scroll to 'Run As...' and select 'Run Configurations' at the bottom. In the menu that appears, select the 'Maven Build' option in the left-side menu and click the new button (a small button that looks like a blank piece of paper with a gold plus sign on it) at the top. A new configuration will be created. You need to set the name at the top of the page, choose the org.eclipse.ice.build/ directory by clicking the "Browse Workspace" button and set the goal to -N install to properly launch the build. Click 'Apply' and then 'Run.'

This downloads and installs any required dependencies, and will probably take a while if this is your first time building ICE binaries. Once all dependencies are downloaded, the last step is to actually build ICE. To do this, right-click on the same pom.xml file in the org.eclipse.ice.build/ directory, and select 'Run As > Maven install.' This will build and test all of ICE's bundles. If this is your first time, this process could take upwards of 10-12 minutes depending on your system. If the build system encounters any errors or failed tests, they will be reported in the Eclipse console window, and the build will be terminated early. Alternatively, if the build is successful, a "BUILD SUCCESS" message will be displayed in the console once the build completes, and the ICE binaries will have been created in your Eclipse workspace.

Locating the ICE Binaries

The resulting ICE binaries are written to a subdirectory of the org.eclipse.ice.repository package under target/products. Note that the target directory may not appear in the Eclipse Package Explorer until the org.eclipse.ice.repository package has been refreshed. To refresh this package, right-click on the package and select 'Refresh' or highlight it and click 'F5.' To execute a binary, navigate to org.eclipse.ice.repository/target/products/<os>/<windowing system>/<arch>/ICE and run the ICE executable.