P2 Repositories

By Moshe Yalo

Proxy and host all your Eclipse® plugins via an Artifactory P2 repository, allowing users to have a single-access-point for all Eclipse® updates.

Over the last several years software development has evolved from focusing on in-house coding to making extensive usage of binary components such as free open-source and commercial libraries as well as proprietary libraries built in-house. Already in a survey conducted back in 2010, 98% of enterprise level companies reported that they use open source software, and a typical software project today will be comprised of more assembled components than proprietary code. This holds not only for software products, but also for the plethora of plugins that we use in our IDEs. While this has obvious benefits in terms of costs and code quality, once a package is developed or downloaded, the organization still faces many challenges in managing its storage and distribution, some of which are:

  • Sharing plugins across the organization
  • Transferring a large number of plugins to a remote location
  • Managing an ever increasing number of plugins through the development cycle
  • Mitigating repository down time

Artifactory is a Binary Repository Manager that boosts your organization’s productivity by addressing these challenges to provide advanced support for proxying and caching of P2 repositories and aggregating P2 metadata. This is done using virtual repositories which serve as a single point of distribution (single URL) for Eclipse,  Tycho and any other P2 clients. This virtual repository aggregates P2 metadata and P2 artifacts from underlying repositories in Artifactory (both local and remote) providing you with full visibility of the P2 artifact sources and allowing powerful management of caching and security for P2 content.