devonfw guide

To update your IDE (if instructed by your Architect), all you need to do is run the following command:

If you are working on different branches in parallel you typically want to use multiple workspaces.

You can have multiple instances of eclipse running for each workspace in parallel. To distinguish these instances you will find the workspace name in the title of eclipse.

For your project you should create a git-repository for the settings. You can customize many aspects this way.

To redistribute the IDE you can decide to use the official vanilla releases of the devonfw-ide scripts. However, you may also add the cloned settings, a custom devon.properties file, or predefine software (be aware of multi-platform-support).

When you have done changes in a larger project (big team), please first test the changes yourself, then pick a pilot user of the team, and only after that works well for a couple of days inform the entire team to update.

During the setup devon eclipse setup will be called what automatically installs Eclipse. The project configuration typically defines the plugins that will be installed via ECLIPSE_PLUGINS variable. Otherwise defaults from this eclipse commandlet will apply. However, for specific needs you may even install additional plugins. In general you should try to stick with the configuration pre-defined by your project. But some plugins may be considered as personal flavor and are typically not predefined by the project config. This e.g. applies for devstyle that allows a real dark mode for eclipse and tunes the theming and layout of Eclipse in general. To avoid that projects ship with too many plugins that may waste resources but are not used by every developer you have the freedom to install some additional plugins. Be aware that this comes at your own risk and sometimes plugins can conflict and break your IDE. The following list of plugins is guaranteed to be supported by this commandlet:

The link-titles are the IDs accepted by devon eclipse add-plugin «id». Otherwise the full featureID has to be specified together with the URL of the update site. However this is intended for project specific configuration. Here is an example how a project can configure the plugins in its devon.properties inside the settings:

For the above listed plugins you can also use the short form:

Of course you may also mix plugin IDs with fully qualified plugins.

Run devon ide setup to initially setup your devonfw-ide. It is recommended to run the setup script in the toplevel directory ($DEVON_IDE_HOME). However, in case you want to skip some system specific integrations, you may also run this command directly instead. The setup only needs to be called once after a new devonfw-ide instance has been created. It will do the following things:

Run devon ide update to update your devonfw-ide. This will check for updates and install them automatically. The optinal extra argument («package») behaves as following:

In order to update to a specific version of scripts an explicit version can be specified after the additional to argument:

The above example will update to the exact version 3.1.99 no matter if this is an upgrade or a downgrade of your current installed version. If you just use devon ide update scripts then the latest available version will be installed. In larger teams it is recommended to communicate exact version updates to avoid that a new release can interfere and break anything. Therefore some pilot user will test a new version for the entire team and only after successful test will communicate to the team to update to that exact version by providing the complete command as in the above example.

We hope you love devonfw-ide. However, if you don’t and want to get rid of it entirely and completely remove all integrations, you can use this command:

This will remove devonfw-ide from all central places of your OS (user home directory such as scripts, .devon, .bashrc, as well as windows registry, etc.). However, it will not remove your actual installations (or shared software folder). So after running this uninstall, simply remove your DEVON_IDE_HOME directory of all devonfw-ide installations and potential shared software folder. You may also want to clean up your ~/Downloads directory from files downloaded by devonfw-ide. We do not automate this as deleting a directory is a very simple manual step and we do not want to take responsibility for severe data loss if your workspaces contained valuable work.

Examples for create a new devon4j application:

Will create an app with package com.example.domain.myapp, groupId com.example.domain, artifactId myapp, version 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT, and h2 database.

Will create an app with package com.example.domain.myapp, groupId com.example.domain, artifactId myapp, version 0.0.1-alpha1, and h2 database.

Will create an app with package com.example.domain.myapp, groupId com.example.group, artifactId myapp, version 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT, and h2 database.

Will create an app with package com.example.domain.myapp, groupId com.example.group, artifactId demo-app, version 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT, and h2 database.

Will create an app with package com.example.domain.myapp, groupId com.example.group, artifactId demo-app, version 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT, and SAP hana database.

Will create an app with package com.example.domain.myapp, groupId com.example.group, artifactId myapp, version 0.0.1, oracle database, and with a batch module.

The settings folder (see SETTINGS_PATH) has to following file structure:

As you can see the settings folder contains sub-folders for tools of the IDE. So the devon folder contains devon.properties files for the configuration of your environment. Further, for the IDEs such as eclipse or vscode the according folders contain the templates to manage the workspace via our configurator.

Different tools and configuration files require a different handling:

You can easily customize these settings for the requirements of your project. We suggest that one team member is responsible to ensure that everything stays consistent and works.

You may also create new sub-folders in settings and put individual things according to your needs. E.g. you could add scripts for greasemonkey or tampermonkey, as well as scripts for your database or whatever may be useful and worth to share in your team. However, to share and maintain knowledge we recommend to use a wiki.

By default software is downloaded via the internet from public download URLs of the according tools. However, some projects may need specific tools or tool versions that are not publicly available. In such case, they can create their own software repository (e.g. in a VPN) and configure the base URL of it via DEVON_SOFTWARE_REPOSITORY variable. Then devonfw-ide will download all software from this repository only instead of the default public download URLs. This repository (URL) should be accessible within your network via HTTPS (or HTTP) and without any authentication. The repository needs to have the following structure:

So for every tool «tool» (java, maven, vscode, eclipse, etc.) you need to provide a folder in your repository. Within this folder for every supported version «version» you need a subfolder. This subfolder needs to contain the tool in that version for every operating system «os» (windows, linux, or mac - omitted if platform independent, e.g. for maven).

By default each installation of devonfw-ide has its own physical installations of the required tools in the desired versions stored in its local software folder. While this is great for isolation of devonfw-ide installations and to prevent side-effects, it can cause a huge waste of disc resources in case you are having many installations of devonfw-ide. If you are a power-user of devonfw-ide with more then ten or even up to hundreds of installations on your machine, you might love to share installations of a software tool in a particular version between multiple devonfw-ide installations.

In order to do so, you only need to configure the variable DEVON_SOFTWARE_PATH in your ~/devon.properties pointing to an existing directory on your disc (e.g. /projects/software or C:\projects\software). Then devonfw-ide will install required software into ${DEVON_SOFTWARE_PATH}/${software_name}/${software_version} as needed and create a symbolic link to it in ${DEVON_IDE_HOME}/software/${software_name}.

As a benefit another devonfw-ide installation will using the same software with the same version can re-use the existing installation and only needs to create the symbolic link. No more waste of having many identical JDK installations on your disc.

As a drawback you need to be aware that specific tools may be "manipulated" after installation. The most common case is that a tool allows to install plugins or extensions such as all IDEs do. Such "manipulations" will cause side-effects between the different devonfw-ide installations sharing the same version of that tool. While this can also be a benefit it may also cause trouble. If you have a sensitive project that should not be affected by such side-effects, you may again override the DEVON_SOFTWARE_PATH variable to the empty value in your ${DEVON_IDE_HOME}/conf/devon.properties of that sensitive installation:

This will disable this feature particularly for that specific sensitive devonfw-ide installation but let you use it for all other ones.

In some cases a project might need a (proprietary) tool(s) that is not supported by devonfw-ide. A very simple solution is to get a release of devonfw-ide and add the tool(s) to the software folder and then distribute this modified release to your team. However, this has several drawbacks as you then have a fork of devonfw-ide all will loose your tool(s) when updating to a new release.

As a solution for this need, devonfw-ide offers you to configure cutom tools via the DEVON_IDE_CUSTOM_TOOLS variable. It can be defined in devon.properties of your settings git repository as an array of the custom tools you need to add. Each entry applies:

As an example we define the following in ${DEVON_IDE_HOME}/settings/devon.properties:

This will download and extract the following to your software folder:

Please note that if you are not using windows, the -windows suffix will be -mac or -linux.