I am a proponent of an open source software, so I have always been keen to give back. Eclipse IDE being a program which I use almost everyday has always been in my list of projects to contribute to. However, I never seem to find enough time to dive deep enough into any of the projects to fix even relatively small bugs. One day I noticed that eclipse web sites are also open sourced and anybody, with enough web development knowledge, can submit patches. That is how I decided to try working a bit on Eclipse sites in my spare time.

Most Eclipse projects’ sites are built using another Eclipse project called Phoenix. It is written in PHP and basically provides templating and common components for static pages. It requires a bit of copy paste but other than that does not get in the way. Another not so good thing is documentation which is a bit messy and outdated. It also does not describe the setup for local development but gives the idea that everything that is needed is an Apache server and PHP. I did not want to install either of them on my laptop, so I decided to use a virtual machine.

That is where Vagrant and Puppet come into play and make contributing to eclipse sites hassle free for me and others. I configured a simple Vagrant machine and wrote a small puppet manifest for provisioning an Apache and PHP, which I made freely available on my Github (usage notes are in README file). Now if I see something that needs to be fixed on the eclipse site, I can simply clone its repo, run vagrant up and I am ready for coding with instant feedback.