Deploying the infocenter as a Web Archive

Using Eclipse 3.4 or later it is possible to configure the help plugins to be deployed as a web archive (war file) which will act as a fully
functioning infocenter. The instructions below assume a Tomcat server has been installed, but with minor modifications
these steps should work for any full featured server.

In your Eclipse installation locate the plugin org.eclipse.help.webapp.<version>.jar and copy it to a temporary directory,
unzip the copy into that folder.

  1. In the webapp plugin locate the web-archive directory and underneath that there will be two directories titled "help" and
    "org.eclipse.help.infocenter-feature".
  2. Import the org.eclipse.help.infocenter-feature using File->Import->Existing Project.
  3. Export org.eclipse.help.infocenter-feature as a deployable feature and set the destination to be web-archive/help/WEB-INF/eclipse in the area where org.eclipse.help.webapp.<version>.jar was unzipped.
  4. Add some documentation plugins to the webapps/help/WEB-INF/eclipse/plugins directory.
  5. Download org.eclipse.equinox.http.servletbridge_<version>.jar and org.eclipse.equinox.servletbridge_<version>.jar from the equinox download site. Select a version of Equinox that matches the version of Eclipse you are running to take you to the downloads page.
  6. Extract servletbridge.jar from org.eclipse.equinox.servletbridge_<version>.jar.
  7. Add the file servletbridge.jar to the help/WEB-INF/lib directory. You may need to create this directory.
  8. Add the file org.eclipse.equinox.http.servletbridge_<version>.jar to the help/WEB-INFeclipse/plugins directory
  9. At this stage you can create a war file from the help directory or you can copy the directory and its contents to the webapps folder of your Tomcat installation.
  10. Start Tomcat and see the help system start up.
Notes: If you look in the config.ini in the help.war file under directory help/WEB_INF/eclipse/configuration you will notice the
line eclipse.product=org.eclipse.productname. If your product has help system customizations in a product plugin you can
activate these by changing this line to point to your product plugin.