Help as a Standalone Application

I've been giving training on Eclipse Plugin Development in Bangalore for an year or so. Lot many sessions and lot many questions. Many of the questions are repeated in every session. Till I collect them and post them as a FAQ, I plan to post few in this blog.

The first question here is on help: "We have a set of doc plugins for our product. How to host them on the net like the one at help.eclipse.org?"

Eclipse ships a class called org.eclipse.help.standalone.Infocenter, which is available in org.eclipse.help.base_{version}.jar. It has a main method, so you can run it as a standalone application. You need the following arguments:

-command start
-port 80
-eclipsehome

Assuming the jar is in the classpath, the command would be:

java org.eclipse.help.standalone.Infocenter -command start -port 80 -eclipsehome /Users/prakashgr/eclipse/