SimpleConfigurator 'bundles.info' file

09 February 2022

Any Eclipse RCP Client applications is a set of OSGi bundles started inside an Equinox framework.

The list of bundles that are started and the order is often controlled by the SimpleConfigurator and its bundles.info file.

The bundles.info file is located inside the configuration folder of the Eclipse RCP application.

For Mac OS, it is located inside the *.app file (use the context menu "Show Package Contents" to open it):

MyApp.app
└── Contents
    └── Eclipse
        └── configuration
            └── org.eclipse.equinox.simpleconfigurator
                └── bundles.info

For windows or linux it is next to the *.exe file or bin file:

MyApp
├── myapp.exe
└── configuration
    └── org.eclipse.equinox.simpleconfigurator
        └── bundles.info

The file describes the list of bundles that will be started. It is more or less a CSV file, that looks like this:

#encoding=UTF-8
#version=1
org.eclipse.equinox.app,1.5.100.v20210212-1143,plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.app_1.5.100.v20210212-1143.jar,4,false
org.eclipse.equinox.common,3.14.100.v20210212-1143,plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.common_3.14.100.v20210212-1143.jar,2,true

For each bundle, the bundles.info file contains one line with this information:

  • symbolic name

  • version

  • location

  • start level

  • marked as started

The bundles are alphabetically sorted inside a bundles.info file. This make the comparison between two files easy.

The code that is parsing those files can be found in SimpleConfiguratorUtils.java:

  • SimpleConfiguratorUtils#readConfiguration(InputStream, URI)

  • And for one line: SimpleConfiguratorUtils#parseBundleInfoLine(String, URI)

This can be useful to investigate Eclipse RCP startup issues.

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