Eclipse RCP: Setting P2 repositories (update sites) programmatically (for when p2.inf fails).

Bobby Coop    Eclipse, Java, programming    

When deploying a p2 enabled RCP product, you often want to set the update sites that can be used so that they include yours.  There are many resources that explain about using p2.inf to do this.  However, there is an issue when trying to do this with an application that will be installed into Program Files (or any non-user-writable location) on the user’s machine.  p2.inf operates by writing the repository to disk the first time that the RCP application is run.  If the application is not user-writable, this will silently fail.

To set the repositories manually, you can use the same technique as the P2 property page:

import org.eclipse.equinox.internal.p2.ui.model.MetadataRepositoryElement;
import org.eclipse.equinox.internal.p2.ui.model.ElementUtils;

@SuppressWarnings("restriction")
public class P2Util {
  private static String UPDATE_SITE = "http://www.example.com/update_site";

  public static void setRepositories() throws InvocationTargetException {
    try {
      final MetadataRepositoryElement element = new MetadataRepositoryElement(null, new URI(UPDATE_SITE), true);
      ElementUtils.updateRepositoryUsingElements(new MetadataRepositoryElement[] {element}, null);
    } catch (URISyntaxException e) {
      e.printStackTrace();
      throw new InvocationTargetException(e);
    }
  }
}

Note that you need all of the repositories to be present in the

ElementUtils.updateRepositoryUsingElements

call; repositories not in that array will be removed.

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