How do I develop on a virtual machine using Eclipse?

Question

I have a project that I built on my virtual machine using sbt. During the build process it installs several libraries in the ~/root/ directory in my virtual machine. For example, part of the .classpath file looks like:

<classpathentry kind="lib" path="/root/.ivy2/cache/org.apache.avro/avro/jars/avro-1.7.6.jar"/>
<classpathentry kind="lib" path="/root/.ivy2/cache/org.codehaus.jackson/jackson-core-asl/jars/jackson-core-asl-1.9.13.jar"/>
<classpathentry kind="lib" path="/root/.ivy2/cache/org.codehaus.jackson/jackson-mapper-asl/jars/jackson-mapper-asl-1.9.13.jar"/>
<classpathentry kind="lib" path="/root/.ivy2/cache/org.apache.commons/commons-compress/jars/commons-compress-1.4.1.jar"/>

I am running Eclipse on my Mac OS on the host machine and when I import an Eclipse project (through a samba mount) I end up with a bunch of import errors because the class paths are only valid on my guest machine.

What is the typical / standard way to develop Java / Scala projects within a virtual environment while running the Eclipse application from your host machine?

Am I better off doing all the development on my host machine?

Answer 1

This is not necessary a typical or standard solution to the above problem. However, it solved my specific issue when using sbt-eclipse plugin to generate the project files.

Turns out you can pass in a relative path to the sbt-eclipse plugin and that will propagate to the .classpath file.

./sbt eclipse -ivy ./ivy

That way when you import the project into Eclipse it will use all of the relative paths based on the root project path. It seems to work so far.

<classpathentry kind="lib" path="./ivy/cache/org.apache.avro/avro-compiler/bundles/avro-compiler-1.7.6.jar"/>
<classpathentry kind="lib" path="./ivy/cache/org.apache.avro/avro/bundles/avro-1.7.6.jar"/>
<classpathentry kind="lib" path="./ivy/cache/org.codehaus.jackson/jackson-core-asl/jars/jackson-core-asl-1.9.13.jar"/>
<classpathentry kind="lib" path="./ivy/cache/org.codehaus.jackson/jackson-mapper-asl/jars/jackson-mapper-asl-1.9.13.jar"/>
<classpathentry kind="lib" path="./ivy/cache/org.apache.commons/commons-compress/jars/commons-compress-1.4.1.jar"/>

Note that while this solves the import errors, the application is still being run on the host machine instead of the virtual machine.