P2 Repositories

Artifactory provides advanced support for proxying and caching of P2 repositories and aggregating P2 metadata using an Artifactory virtual repository which serves 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.

For more information on defining virtual repositories please refer to Virtual Repositories.

Integration Benefits

JFrog Artifactory and Eclipse P2 Repositories

To use P2 repositories, follow the steps below:

Defining a Virtual Repository

• From the Administration module, select Repositories | Repositories | Virtual and Create a new virtual repository and set P2 as the Package Type.

Tip

If developers in your organization use different versions of Eclipse (e.g. Helios and Juno), we recommend that you define a different P2 virtual repository for each Eclipse version in use.

Selecting Local Repositories

Adding a local repository to your virtual P2 repository does not require any special configuration:

• Simply select the desired local repository from the Local Repository field. Usually, this will be either a Maven or a Generic repository.

• In the Path Prefix field, specify the path to the P2 metadata files (content.jar, artifacts.jar, compositeContent.xml etc.). If left empty, the default is to assume that the P2 metadata files are directly in the repository root directory.

• Click Add.

If you have a Tycho repository deployed to a local repository as a single archive, specify the archive's root path. For example: eclipse-repository.zip!/

Selecting Remote Repositories

To add a remote P2 repository to Artifactory, enter the URL to the corresponding P2 metadata files (content.jar, artifacts.jar, compositeContent.xml, etc.) and click the "Add" button

A common example is the main Juno repository: http://download.eclipse.org/releases/juno

Artifactory analyzes the added URL and identifies which remote repositories should to be created in Artifactory based on the remote P2 metadata (since remote P2 repositories may aggregate information from different hosts).

Tip

When P2 metadata files reside inside an archived file, simply add '!' to the end of the URL.

For example: http://eclipse.org/equinox-sdk.zip!/

Creating the Repositories

Once you have selected the local and remote repositories to include in your virtual repository, Artifactory will indicate what action will be taken once you select the Save & Finish button.

The possible actions are as follows:

Action	Description
Create*	Creates a new, P2 enabled, remote repository with the given key (you may still edit the remote repository key).
Modify*	Enables P2 support in an existing remote repository.
Include	Adds the repository to the list of repositories aggregated by this virtual repository.
Included	No action will be taken. This repository is already included in the virtual repository.

*For remote repositories only

Allowing Anonymous Access

Artifactory supports P2 repositories with Allow Anonymous Access enabled. For more information, see Allow Anonymous Access.Introduction to the General Security Settings

When Allow Anonymous Access is enabled, Artifactory will not query the P2 client for authentication parameters by default, so you need to indicate to Artifactory to request authentication parameters in a different way.

You can override the default behavior by selecting the Force Authentication checkbox in the New or Edit Repository dialog.

When set, Artifactory will first request authentication parameters from the P2 client before trying to access this repository.

Artifactory fully supports hosting of Tycho plugins as well as resolving Tycho build dependencies.

To resolve all build dependencies through Artifactory, simply change the repository URL tag of your build's pom.xml file as displayed in the snippet below:

<repository>
    <id>eclipse-indigo</id>
    <layout>p2</layout>
    <url>http://localhost:8081/artifactory/p2-virtual</url>
</repository>

When using P2-enabled repositories with multiple remote repositories that have the same base URL (e.g http://download.eclipse.org ) , you need to ensure that only 1 remote repository is created within your virtual repository (for each base URL). When creating your virtual repository, Artifactory takes care of this for you, but if you are creating the remote repositories manually, you must ensure to create only a single remote repository, and point the sub-paths accordingly in the P2 virtual repository definition.

In the example below, http://download.eclipse.org/releases/helios and http://download.eclipse.org/releases/juno were both added to the same virtual repository...repository.

...but in fact, the virtual repository only really includes one remote repository

The Google Plugin for Eclipse does not support Eclipse 4.7 (Oxygen) or later and is no longer available. For more details please refer to the Google Cloud Platform documentation.

To configure your P2 repository to proxy GWT, set the remote repository URL in Artifactory to be: http://storage.googleapis.com/gwt-eclipse-plugin/v3/release