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Eclipse base

Info

The Docker image name for this image is eclipse/base

The Eclipse base image runs the Eclipse Project in a Docker container. The Eclipse client can be downloaded and can optionally be customised prior to building the Docker image. EGit is installed as default package.

Supported versions

The image has been tested with the following versions:

  • 4.26.0
  • 4.27.0

Supported architectures

We support and have tested the image against the arm64 and amd64 build architectures for the supported versions.

Use the prebuilt image

The Eclipse image is not available as prebuilt image yet.

Build it yourself

Preparation

Download Eclipse

Download a Eclipse Linux binary tar.gz archive. You can get a release directly from Eclipse. Visit https://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/, then find a release in the Latest Release section. Scroll down to "Platform Runtime Binary" and select the package for the Linux platform with the matching build architecture.

Place the downloaded archive in the subdirectory eclipse/versions/$ECLIPSE_VERSION/$BUILD_ARCHITECTURE of the present repository and ensure that the end result is either

  • eclipse/versions/$ECLIPSE_VERSION/$BUILD_ARCHITECTURE/eclipse.tar.gz.

where ECLIPSE_VERSION refers to the semantic version of Eclipse, e.g. 4.27.0.

Optional: Customisation of the Eclipse client

To customise the Eclipse client you can

  1. extract the downloaded archive,
  2. apply any modifications (e.g., installation of plugins and/ or dropins) to it, and
  3. compress the modified folder to get a eclipse.tar.gz again.

Build it manually with Docker

docker build -t eclipse/base eclipse --build-arg ECLIPSE_VERSION=$ECLIPSE_VERSION

Run the container

Locally on X11 systems

If you don't need remote access, have a local X11 server running and just want to run Eclipse locally, this may be the best option for you.

On some systems, you have to whitelist connections to the X-Server with:

xhost +local

It allows all local programs to connect to your X server. You can further restrict the access to the X server. Please read the documentation of xhost for more details.

The container can be started with the following command. The DISPLAY environment has to be passed to the container.

docker run -d \
    -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix \
    -e DISPLAY=$(DISPLAY) \
    eclipse/base

Eclipse should start after a few seconds.

In a remote container (RDP)

Please follow the instructions on the remote page. When running the image, add the following variables to the docker run command:

    -e AUTOSTART_ECLIPSE=$AUTOSTART_ECLIPSE \
    -e RESTART_ECLIPSE=$RESTART_ECLIPSE \

Please replace the followings variables:

  • AUTOSTART_ECLIPSE defines the autostart behaviour of Eclipse. When set to 1 (default), Eclipse will be started as soon as an RDP connection has been established to the running container.
  • RESTART_ECLIPSE defines the restart behaviour of Eclipse. When set to 1 (default) and when RESTART_ECLIPSE=1, Eclipse will be re-started as soon as it has been exited (after clean quits as well as crashs).

If you want to configure the JVM memory options, have a look at Eclipse memory options.