Sharing Git Configurations With Your Team

When new developers join a team, or existing developers move quickly between projects, setting up a development environment can be a real headache.  Most software teams will (hopefully) share a set of instructions on a wiki that include:

• The tools that must be installed (and where to get them).  In many projects this should also include the version of the tool that is to be used plus all the dependencies that are required
• A set of SCM locations from which to fetch the source code (Git, CVS, SVN, etc…)
• Common preferences such as Checkstyle rules, compiler settings, etc…
• A set of repositories to fetch ’target components’ or libraries that are used for development, testing and runtime

If the instructions are up-to-date, then setting up the development environment should go smoothly (assuming that plugins and components are still available, and the new developer is able to understand any acronyms or nuances in the instructions).   If the instructions are hard to follow, a developer may spend a day or more just getting started.

Yoxos is a service for building and sharing Eclipse configurations with your team. Yoxos takes you away from ‘instructions on a wiki’ and automates this procedure for you.  While the most common usage is to create custom tool configurations, Yoxos also supports several workspace provisioning operations.  This means that you can share both the configuration of Eclipse plugins used in your development environment as well as well as the workspace settings themselves.

In this example I’ll show you how to use Yoxos Git Provisioning, in order to share your Git configurations.

1. Install the Yoxos Git Provisioning Tools

In order to use the Yoxos Git Provisioning tools, the tools themselves must first be installed. The tools can be found by searching for them in Yoxos Perspective (Yoxos Git Provisioning).

2. Saving a Git Configuration

Once you have your initial workspace setup (projects cloned and imported), you can save this configuration to a Yoxos profile by selecting the Git Repositories tab in Yoxos Perspective and choosing import From Workspace. This will present a dialog, allowing you to import your projects from your current workspace:

The import dialog allows you choose which repositories you want to include, and which Eclipse projects should be automatically imported once the repository has been cloned.

Since Git repositories are all local (to your machine), and sharing local repositories has very little value, Yoxos Git Tooling will propose a ‘remote’ repository.  You can configure which remote to use by selecting the repository URL combo (it will select the one named ‘origin’ by default’).

Once you’ve added the repository it will appear in your Eclipse Installation View. Make sure you save the profile.

3. Get Up-And-Running Faster

Once you have created the profile, others can download it and start it with the Yoxos Launcher (simply double click the .yoxos file, or start the launcher, load the profile, and choose launch).  Yoxos will first install all the required tools and start Eclipse. Once started, Yoxos will provision all the workspace settings. In this case, it will clone the Git repositories and import the Eclipse projects: