Setting Up a Metacat Eclipse Project

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The following are the steps to download Eclipse, load the Metacat project and its dependent projects, set up the environment, and run Metacat via Tomcat from within Eclipse.

One note, these instructions are based on my development system, which is a Linux system. I rarely use apt-get install (debian) or yum install (fedora) to install supporting applications like Java, Tomcat and Apache. This is because I want a certain level of control over where these apps are installed, and I like to be able to install several versions side by side so I can switch back and forth in my development environment.

My typical approach is to install the application in the /usr directory. Then I create a symlink from /usr/local to this install. Any environment variables reference this symlink, so I can easily modify the symlink to change the version of the application.

Install Java (assuming it's not already installed):

Install Tomcat (assuming it's not already installed):

Download and Install Eclipse:

Get Subversion plugin:

The subversion plugin allows you to checkout and manage your code against an SVN repository

Check out metacat code:

Set up Metacat Dependencies

These dependencies are primarily so you can eliminate reference errors in the code and so you can debug when running in tomcat.

Build Metacat

A full description of how to build Metacat is beyond the scope of this document, however you should be able to do all Ant tasks from within eclipse.

Set up Tomcat in Eclipse:

Advanced Operations:

There are many more advanced operations that can be performed from within Eclipse, including running individual classes, regular expression searching, jumping to implementation source and more. Please refer to Eclipse Documentation for more information.


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