Eclipse with PTP and version control

If you’re not familiar with Eclipse, read our introduction page first.

Eclipse also supports several version control systems out of the box or through optional plug-ins.

The PTP (Parallel Tools Platform) strongly encourages a model where you run eclipse locally on your workstation and let Eclipse synchronise the project files with your cluster account. If you want to use version control in this scenario, the PTP manual advises to put your local files under version control (which can be done through Eclipse also) and synchronise that with some remote repository (e.g., one of the hosting providers), and to not put the automatically synchronised version of the code that you use for compiling and running on the cluster also under version control. In other words,

• The version control system is used to version manage your files on your local workstation,

• And Eclipse PTP is then used to manage the files on the cluster.

If you still want to use the cluster file space as a remote repository, we strongly recommend that you do this in a different directory from where you let Eclipse synchronise the files, and don’t touch the files in that repository directly.

For experts

The synchronised projects feature in Eclipse internally uses the Git version control system to take care of the synchronisation. That’s also the reason why the Parallel Software Development bundle of Eclipse comes with the EGit plug-in included. It does this however in a way that does not interfere with regular git operations. In both your local and remote project directory, you’ll find a hidden .ptp-sync directory fact is a regular git repository, but stored in a different subdirectory rather than the standard .git subdirectory. So you can still have a standard Git repository besides it and they will not interfere if you follow the guidelines on this page.

Note that the remote synchronization also adds other hidden files besides the .ptp-sync directory. Don’t erase them.