How to re-install Eclipse 3.8 IDE with Yiiclipse and RSE on Ubuntu

Preliminaries

Maybe I could re-install Eclipse today...

I struggled with this all day long. Just moved to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS which completely messed up my perfect Eclipse setup. All this happened in a middle of an important project of course. Feel free to call me an idiot since a normal person would never do that (and I already swore that I don't do so in the future) but I would have never guessed that it takes me one day (!!!) to restore back to the original state.

Before I upgraded my Ubuntu version from 13.10 to 14.04 LTS I have installed Eclipse from Ubuntu's Software Center. Since then I have installed Yiiclipse and RSE (Remote System Explorer) plugins for Eclipse as I work in PHP and I prefer to use cloud directly instead of sync the code all the time. After the OS upgrade I got the following error messages in Eclipse and I couldn't open my RSE project at all.

Editor could not be initialized.
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException:at org.eclipse.core.runtime.Assert.isLegal(Assert.java:63)at org.eclipse.core.runtime.Assert.isLegal(Assert.java:47)...

I tried to remove and add the project again to project explorer but I kept getting the error messages. This was the time when I decided to re-install the above mentioned two plugins to see if it helps. It didn't. I tried to get help from several forums with no luck, thus I decided to re-install the complete Eclipse IDE. It took me almost one day to figure out how can I completely get rid of Eclipse and all of its plugins, and then install a new working instance. That's why I thought that it would worth to share my experiences in a blog post, perhaps others can learn from it, and it's also a good thing to note down all the steps I did to avoid a similar case in the future.

Step by step guide to re-install Eclipse

Few things that you need to know

Removing Eclipse through Ubuntu's Software Center doesn't do the trick since all your previously installed plugins and all of your settings stay on your PC in different system folders and you need to remove these manually. Your workspace must be also deleted (WARNING: Be sure to make a backup of your projects before you remove workspace folder!!!), since Eclipse RSE plugin stores your connection information there. If you don't remove these and you re-install Eclipse only it will conflict with plugins of your previous installation. So let's see how to avoid this.

Removing your previous Eclipse installation

1.) Remove eclipse via Ubuntu Software Center. (If you installed Eclipse manually you can skip this step.)

Remove Eclipse via Software Center

2.) Remove all remnants of Eclipse manually. For this fire up a terminal by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T and issue the following command:

$ gksu nautilus

A window will pop up where you need to authenticate with your root account. Once it's done a file manager will start. Navigate to your system drive and search for all files which include "eclipse".

Search for files containing "eclipse" on your system drive

Once the search query finished, select (Ctrl+A) and delete all of them.

3.) Delete your Eclipse workspace folder also. WARNING: Make sure to create a backup for all of your existing projects which reside in this folder!!! Eclipse stores some metadata information and some temporary files for your RSE connection in your workspace. By removing this folder we can make sure that it won't make any conflict with your new Eclipse installation. If you did everything right so far then you don't even have a piece of Eclipse on your PC now. So let's start to make a new Eclipse setup with Yii and RSE support.

4.) Open up Software Center and install Eclipse again. Search for Eclipse, and choose Eclipse Integrated Development Environment from the result list.

Install Eclipse IDE from Software Center

Once the installation finished you have a brand new Eclipse 3.8 instance on your system. To check if it starts up correctly, launch it from Unitiy dash.

Start Eclipse from Unity

5.) Install DLTK for Eclipse. DLTK (Dynamic Languages Toolkit) is comprised of a set of extensible frameworks designed to reduce the complexity of building full featured development environments for dynamic languages such as PHP and Perl. This plugin is a prerequisite of Yiiclispe. You can install it from Eclipse's 3.8 Indigo repository (http://download.eclipse.org/releases/indigo/). Do to so, go to Help > Install New Software menu option. This will open up a new window. From here select the Indigo repository from the Work with: drop-down box. If you can't find it in the drop-down list, add it manually by clicking on the Add button on the right-hand side.

Once the repository is selected wait until Eclipse loads the content of it, then type dynamic into the search box. It will take a while till Eclipse filters the result. Tick Dynamic Languages Toolkit - Core Frameworks and Dynamic Languages Toolkit - Remote Development Support under General Purpose Tools category.

Installing DLTK plugin for Eclipse

After you selected the two plugins click Next and accept the agreement, then finish the installation.

6.) Install Remote System Explorer for Eclipse. RSE is a perspective and toolkit in Eclipse Workbench, that allows you to connect and work with a variety of remote systems. With the predefined plug-ins, you can look at remote file systems, transfer files between hosts, do remote search, execute commands and work with processes. To install it for Eclipse go to Help > Install New Software menu option and choose Indigo repository again. Type remote into the search box and wait until Eclipse filters the results.

Install RSE for Eclipse

Tick Remote System Explorer - End-User Runtime and Remote System Explorer - User Actions plugins and install both of them.

7.) Install Yiiclipse plugin for Eclipse. Yiiclipse leverages productivity and speed of Yii application development. It provides a great integrity with Eclipse. To install it go to Help > Install New Software menu option but instead of choosing Indigo repository, this time we need to add the update site of Yiiclipse (http://yiiclipse.maziarz.org/updatesite/STABLE/). Please refer to section no. 5 if you don't know how to add new software update site to Eclipse. 

Yiiclipse installation for Eclipse

That's it! If you completed these steps you have a working Eclipse 3.8 environment with RSE and Yii support. As a next step you can start to set up your remote system connection via the RSE plugin and then create a new remote Yii project or load and existing one.