migration-from-devonfw.adoc

Migration to IDEasy

If you used devonfw-ide for your projects so far, and you want to switch to IDEasy, this page is the right place for you.

Comparison of IDEasy and devonfw-ide

The following table gives an overview of common CLI calls in both products:

Table 1. CLI command comparison

devonfw-ide	IDEasy	Meaning
devon	ide	Setup environment variables for the current project.
devon ide update	ide update	Pull updates to your settings from git and apply changes to your project.
devon ide update scripts	ide upgrade	Upgrade to the latest product verion. In IDEasy this is a global operation affecting all projects while in devonfw-ide each project had its own "product installation"
devon ide create …​	ide create …​	Create a new project.
devon «tool» setup	ide install «tool»	Install the specified tool.
devon «tool» [args]	ide «tool» [args]	Run the specified tool (install proper version first if not already installed)
devon «tool» version get	ide get-version «tool»	Get (print) the version of the specified tool.
devon «tool» version set «version»	ide set-version «tool» «version»	Set the version of the specified tool to the given version.
devon help	ide help	Print the help.
devon project setup …​	ide repository setup …​	Setup the specified or all (active) code repositories

For varabiles check the documentation of variables in devonfw-ide and variables in IDEasy.

Backward compatibility

IDEasy is designed backward compatible to devonfw-ide. That means we will still read devon.properties if present and no ide.properties are found instead. Also it honors legacy variable names from devonfw-ide like DEVON_IDE_TOOLS or DEVON_IDE_CUSTOM_TOOLS. Also workspace templates are still supported even with legacy syntax to emulate the behaviour of devonfw-ide in IDEasy.

As a result, users can install IDEasy alongside with devonfw-ide and start testing IDEasy in their existing project. This is the recommended way to do a pilot test of IDEasy in a larger devonfw-ide project. Once some first feedback has been collected and the team is convinced you are ready for the next step.

Migration to IDEasy

Once you have tested IDEasy and seen its superiour features you want to migrate your project from devonfw-ide to IDEasy. Depending on your team size this should be well prepared:

• Start the migration of your settings on a feature branch (see details below)

• Check that if new developers create the project from scratch all works as expected

• Check that switching the settings to the new feature branch in an existing devonfw-ide setup of your project is working well with IDEasy

• After all has been tested by pilot users plan the roll out to the entire team

• Merge the feature branch of your settings to the main branch

• Consider a migration script for your developers to automate the migration that you also test upfront

• Finally update your instructions in developer manual (wiki) to IDEasy and tell all existing developers to do the migration

Migration of settings

In order to fully migrate your project to IDEasy (after installing and testing it with backward compatibility), run the following command:

ide upgrade-settings

This will migrate all your legacy configuration files (devon.properties, etc.) to IDEasy (ide.properties, ide-custom-tools.json, etc.) automatically. It will also log which file was renamed, moved or changed. For changes in your settings, you can use git to analyze the diff and review the changes.

To leverage the potential of IDEasy with its advanced XML merger, consider to manually improve your workspace XML templates (esp. for IntelliJ). You may also replace your IntelliJ workspace configuration with the latest state from here and also consider reading our diffs like this commit.