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.
Popularity: 15% [?]
Entries (RSS)
[...] Development tools to USB Following my own instructions for a portable web development USB drive and portable Eclipse installation, I created the drive with all the documents and tools I need for web development. That way I [...]
As u suggested, using this path didn’t work on my system, hence I used the following :
.\JavaFiles\jdk1.6.0_01\bin
Thanks for the knowlegde-share
Even though installed and running from a USB, does Eclipse leave registry entries behind? Same for Aptana?
I don’t believe it leaves anything in registry… I took a quick look and couldn’t find any entries.
Great solution, but note this -
I came across a bug with trying to run Aptana from a USB drive while having an installed version of Aptana on my computer.
I Posted a Bug Report about this issue – http://support.aptana.com/asap/browse/STU-709
I cant say if it was a local error or something more common, I’m not trying it again anyway.
I’ve recently started using Eclipse for development. Running it all from my flash drive is great and everything, but has anyone found a way to get Eclipse to play nice when your drive letter changes? I lose all my workspaces and have to spend several minutes getting setting them all up again. To top it all off, with C++, I can’t get it to dynamically locate my gdb debugger.
Nice solution. What about performance? How does Eclipse perform, compared to running it directly from the hard-disk?
How do I save the project files in the usb drive? This is an absolut path and if I run the drive in a different computer I get a different system letter. Thank you.