Configuring Eclipse for joomla development

This page is meant as a partial update of the Joomla documentation pages by the Joomal community on configuring Eclipse for Joomla development, devoted to the installation and configuration of the Eclipse IDDE for Joomla development. Although this article really helped me a lot to install my environment, there are new Eclipse versions in the meantime so I tried to describe the actual situation as of 28/09/2014 for the installation of Eclipse. It's just meant as an update to the original article, as things change all the time and it's impossible to keep all articles up2date at every moment. I owe a lot to the original article authors.

Additions to the original article:

• Eclipse

  • If you run a Win64 operating system, you have to install the Java 64bit version for Win64, otherwise you will get an error starting up your Eclipse environment. What I found on the internet was a link to a Win8 64 bit Java version, which is now installed on my machine and works well.
  • Don't forget to adapt your PATH environment variable, otherwise Eclipse won't start if you only use the default Java installation because in my experience the PATH wasn't adapted. You can find an explanation on how to adapt your PATH at the Java.com site itself
  • There is now again a specific PHP developer package of Eclipse, which can be found at the Eclipse download site for a couple of different operating systems. I had to choose the 64-bit Windows version, but of course you have to choose whatever fits your needs

• GitHub

  • In the original article, there is a link to Installing Eclipse with PHP and Git. The additions in this part of my article are meant for what is described over there.
  • As you have already installed a correct Eclipse version with PHP and Git included, you don't have to make the extra installations as indicated in the article as they are already installed. So you can skip the section on "Installing Eclipse with PHP and Git".
  • However, you have to create a GitHub account before you can do any integration with GitHub. So before starting the section "Creating a project from a remote repository", you will have to do a couple of extra steps in GitHub. I won't explain anything about the creation of an account on GitHub, except that you have to go to your "Edit Profile" link where you have to select the submenu "SSH keys" in order to generate an SSH key you need for integration in your Eclipse tool. Please follow the explanations of GitHub to generate your own SSH key. Once your SSH key has been generated, import it into your Eclipse environment  by going to Window > Preferences > General > Network Connection > SSH2. There you choose the second tab (Key Management) and you import the key GitHub generated (I installed the Pokki GitHub app on my Win8.1 machine which created this key for me on my own PC). Save your private key and you're ready to start using GitHub as described in the article.

I could execute the rest of the article without any change on the explanation worth mentioning.

I hope these additions can help people like me new to Eclipse and GitHub to have it installed in a smooth way in order to be able to contribute to the Joomla Project. If you have found any mistakes in this article, please feel free to let me know and I will be glad to correct it and give you the credits for the correction.