Installing the Red5Plugin on Mac OS X

Background

The Red5Plugin is an Eclipse plugin to facilitate developing Red5 applications. Once configured correctly, it enables you to start and stop the server easily and create projects from templates.

Prerequisites

• A Red5 server installation, version 0.8 (final release)
• An Eclipse installation, version 3.4.2
• Java 5 for installation. For now, this should be your default JVM.
• After the installation is complete, you will need Java 6 to run Red5. (For Mac OS X systems, you will need to be running 10.5 and be up to date in order to use Java 6. Note that Java 6 requires a 64-bit processor on the Intel platform. The early intel iMac and the MacBook used 32-bit Core processors, so you can't run Java 6 if you have one of these. It's supposedly possible to run Red5 under Java 5, but you're on your own for that).

Installation

To install the Red5 eclipse plugin, you were previously able to follow these directions:

http://jira.red5.org/confluence/display/tools/Installation

However, the Red5 team is in the process of converting their jira/confluence installation to trac, which means the instructions are currently offline (as of this writing).

In the meantime, the following instructions should get you started with the plugin.

1. First, launch Eclipse if it isn't already running.

   

2. The plugin is installed like any other Eclipse update through the Software Updates menu. Go to Help -> Software Updates
   
   
3. Click on the Available Software tab
4. Click on the Add Site button
   
5. For the location, enter http://www.red5.org/projects/red5plugin/update_0.2.x/. If this doesn't work, you can try http://209.20.83.79/projects/red5plugin/update_0.2.x/, which is an alternative location set up by the Red5 team when the main site was previously offline. Then click OK.
   
   
6. Select the features made available by this update site "Red5 Feature"
   
7. Click the Install button
   
   
8. At the following screen, confirm the feature by clicking Next.
   
9. Agree to the license agreement and click Finish.
   
   
10. You are now prompted to restart Eclipse. This is a good idea, so choose Yes.
    
11. Congratulations! You now have the plugin installed. However, there is still some work left to do before you can use the server from within Eclipse. That will be covered in a followup article.