devonfw guide

Developer

As a developer you are supported to setup your IDE automated and fast while you can have a nice cup of coffee (after you provided settings-URL and accepted the license). You only need the settings URL from your ide-admin. Experienced developers can directly call setup «settings-URL». Otherwise if you just call setup (e.g. by double-clicking it), you can enter it when you are prompted for Settings URL (using copy&paste to avoid typos).

Note: devonfw-ide supports autocompletion (since 2021.04.001). Currently this only works in bash (on windows use git bash). Simply type devon and hit [Tab] to get completion.

Update

To update your IDE (if instructed by your ide-admin), you only need to run the following command:

devon ide update

Please note that windows is using file-locking what can have ugly side-effects. To be safe, you should have your IDE tools shut down before invoking the above update command. E.g. if a tool needs to be updated, the old installation folder will be moved to a backup and the new version is installed on top. If there are windows file locks in place this can fail and mess up things. You can still delete the according installation from your software folder and rerun devon ide update if you ran into this error.

Working with multiple workspaces

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

Go to the workspaces folder in your ${DEVON_IDE_HOME} and create a new folder with the name of your choice (e.g. release2.1).
Check out (git clone …) the according projects and branch into that workspace folder.
Open a shell in that new workspace folder (cd to it) and according to your IDE run e.g. eclipse, vscode, or intellij to create your workspace and launch the IDE. You can also add the parameter create-script to the IDE commandlet in order to create a launch-script for your IDE.

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.