Installing with the update site

To install Pydev and Pydev Extensions using the Eclipse Update Manager, you need to use the 'Find and Install' menu, found under the 'Help' item in the menu (as the image indicates).

Then select 'Search for new features for install' (You will follow the same path even if you already have an older version installed).

In the next screen (below), click 'new remote site'

Set the 'Pydev Extensions' update site: http://www.fabioz.com/pydev/updates

NOTE: if you currently have the sourceforge update site, you're advised to remove it (some reports pointed to some problems when having both).

NOTE: The only difference between the sourceforge update site and this one is that the one at sourceforge only contains the Pydev 'Open Source' version, and this one contains both.

Click 'Finish'. You should be presented with the screen below:

Select both features and click 'next'...

NOTE: if the features do not appear to you, you should restart Eclipse and try again (that's because Eclipse caches the results, and sometimes it may have the wrong version in its cache -- which is only cleared when you restart Eclipse).

Now, you'll have to accept the license, click 'next' and in the next screen, review it and click 'finish'. Eclipse should automatically download the plugin contents and present you to a dialog asking if you want to restart (to which you should say yes).

Installing with the zip file

After downloading the zip file (from http://www.fabioz.com/pydev/zips), you have to extract it yourself on top of Eclipse. If you choose to do it, just make sure the plugins folder is extracted on top of the Eclipse plugins folder. After that, restart it with the '-clean' flag, to make sure Eclipse finds out about it.

Checking the installation

You can verify if it is correctly installed going to the menu 'help > about > plug in details' and checking if there are at least 5 plugins with the 'plug-in Id' starting with 'com.python.pydev' and at least other 5 starting with 'org.python.pydev' (and check if they have the version you got).

Uninstalling

If at any time you wish to stop using the Pydev extensions plugin (or any other Eclipse plugin), you can disable it by going to the menu 'help > software updates > manage configuration', selecting the plugin and clicking 'disable', then, you have to restart Eclipse, go to the same place again and then click on 'remove' (note that you have a button in the menu that enables you to see the 'disabled' features.

Most commom problems

Corrupted install: Eclipse sometimes is not able to correctly get the plugin, but will do no checking on whether it is really correct (no md5 checking), and when this happens, you'll usually get a ClassNotFoundException (similar to the example below).

When that happens, you should uninstall it and reinstall again with the update site... if that still fails, you could try to get the zip files, as it will at least give you a warning when it is corrupt.

-- the chance of the files being corrupt in the server is pretty low, as that's something that's always checked in a new release -- but if you're suspicious about it, please contact me, so that I can double-check it.

Also, there have been reports with that error where the only solution that has been consistent has been removing all previous versions of pydev and then installing the latest version.

EXAMPLE
Unable to create this part due to an internal error. Reason for the failure: The editor class could not be instantiated. This usually indicates that the editor's class name was mistyped in plugin.xml.

java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.python.pydev.editor.PyEdit
at org.eclipse.osgi.framework.internal.core.BundleLoader.findClass(BundleLoader.java:405)
at org.eclipse.osgi.framework.internal.core.BundleLoader.findClass(BundleLoader.java:350)
at org.eclipse.osgi.framework.adaptor.core.AbstractClassLoader.loadClass(AbstractClassLoader.java:78)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:235)
at org.eclipse.osgi.framework.internal.core.BundleLoader.loadClass(BundleLoader.java:275)
...