Tycho build 8: Using a target platform

A target platform describes, which features and plug-ins are used to build your product. It further defines where to look for those components.

Using a target platform makes your build reproducible and therefore predictable. Try to use it right from the beginning of your product development.

Tycho Tutorials

For a list of all tycho related tutorials see Tycho Tutorials Overview

Source code for this tutorial is available on github as a single zip archive, as a Team Project Set or you can browse the files online.

Step 1: Creating a target platform

The target file editor in Eclipse is somewhat 'special'. It has its rough edges. If you would like to avoid them I strongly suggest to use the Target Platform Definition DSL and Generator from Mikael Barbero. You need to install it in your IDE, but it will ease your life, trust me. For the next steps I assume you installed the plugin.


Create a new General/Project named com.codeandme.tycho.releng.targetplatform. Now create a new file named com.codeandme.tycho.releng.targetplatform.tpd within that project. Set the content to:

target "Tycho Tutorial" with source requirements

location "http://download.eclipse.org/releases/mars/" eclipse-mars {
 org.eclipse.platform.feature.group
 org.eclipse.rcp.feature.group
 org.eclipse.jdt.feature.group
 org.eclipse.equinox.p2.discovery.feature.feature.group

 org.eclipse.equinox.executable.feature.group
}

After saving select the file in the Project Explorer and select Create Target Definition File from the context menu. A .target file will be generated for you. Now open the .target file in the Target Editor and wait for the components to be loaded. Afterwards click the link in the upper right corner Set as Target Platform to activate it.

A full workspace build is triggered by that action. If all your dependencies can be resolved you should see no error markers on our projects.

Make sure that your target file follows the naming scheme <project name>.target otherwise tycho will not be able to pick it up.

Step 2: Integrate in maven build

Convert the project to a maven project with Packaging set to eclipse-target-definition. Then add it to your master pom. Now we need to change the master pom a little: remove the repositories section as we want to use our target platform instead of the Mars repository. To activate the target definition in maven modify the existing plugin section:

   <plugin>
    <groupId>org.eclipse.tycho</groupId>
    <artifactId>target-platform-configuration</artifactId>
    <version>${tycho.version}</version>
    <configuration>
     <target>
      <artifact>
       <groupId>tycho_example</groupId>
       <artifactId>com.codeandme.tycho.releng.targetplatform</artifactId>
       <version>1.0.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
      </artifact>
     </target>
     <environments>
      <environment>
       <os>win32</os>
       <ws>win32</ws>
       <arch>x86</arch>
      </environment>
     </environments>
    </configuration>
   </plugin>

If you followed my previous tutorials you will only need to add the target section as the rest should already be part of your pom file. The target/artifact/artifactId node refers to the name of the project, that contains the target definition file.

Your build now uses the target definition.

Optional: Mirror settings for a target platform

The location line in tpd files takes an id as last parameter. In our example it is eclipse-mars. This is the id to refer to in your maven mirror settings. So point your mirrorOf parameter in your settings.xml file to eclipse-mars.