How-to: Run Eclipse or Aptana from USB Drive
Posted by Jon Lee in How-to, Web Development, tags: aptana, eclipse, IDE, Java, portable-apps, usb-drive
Last week I mentioned that Eclipse is now my favorite IDE for web development in PHP, HTML, Ruby on Rails and Java. I also mentioned that you can run Eclipse off an USB drive and said I’d write a how-to… well as promised, here it is!
Running Eclipse or Aptana from your USB drive is fairly straight forward. Both programs are available in a standalone zip file that does not require any installation. So to install to USB, simply extract the downloaded zip file anywhere on your USB drive.
However, since both are Java applications, this requires that the host computer you are running on to have the required Java run time files installed. Luckily, there is a way of including these Java runtime files on your USB drive as well. These instructions are for Eclipse but should work with Aptana as well.
- Download and unzip Eclipse SDK to your USB drive (version 3.2.2 at the time of writing).
- In the folder where you installed Eclipse, create a folder called “JavaFiles” or whatever you like.
- Install the Java Development Kit or Runtime files onto your own computer. The path should be something like: C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_01
- Copy the jdk1.6.0_01 folder (or whatever it’s called) into the “JavaFiles” directory on your USB drive.
- In the Eclipse folder, edit the eclipse.ini file and add the following line to the top of the file (with the correct directory name of course):
-vm
.\JavaFiles\jdk1.6.0_01\bin\javaw
Now you can run Eclipse (or Aptana) on any computer even if it doesn’t have Java installed! True portable web development! If you like this, check out my post about free portable web development on a USB drive.
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