How to change the installation directory of IDEasy?

[jan-vcapgemini]

As an IDEasy user I don't want to install IDEasy in the default directory e.g. HDD_ROOT/projects or ~/projects instead I want to set a custom directory where my projects are stored. How can I achieve this?

[jan-vcapgemini]

Rationale

First of all, you should understand that we have good reasons for this default behaviour:

• $IDE_ROOT is not like a regular software installation path if you install a regular application to your OS (on windows typically to Program Files folder). Instead this is the folder where all your IDE projects will be created and located. IDEasy is very different from a regular software since it supports installing many other tools in a sandbox that does not interfere with your global tool installations on your operating system.
• Many tools (including famous ones like Maven) have bugs on Windows if their installation path is too long or containing whitespaces, special Unicode characters, etc. - see devonfw-ide#100 for details.
• Further the $IDE_ROOT folder will become your central place of working. Most newbe users have no clue of that impact in the future, if they choose a custom directory for this. In our previous product devonfw-ide there was complete freedom and we observed during support that newbe users had implicitly chosen the directory where they manually extracted our software archive (TGZ download) and this turned out to be in the cryptical windows temporary directory, the users desktop, etc. including subfolders like devonfw-ide-scripts-2024.11.002.tar. Then they ended up with working daily in such odd path locations causing errors and confusions.
• As a result we guide our users to follow best practices and gain more homogeneity of IDEasy installations. We still allow you to chose e.g. D:/projects if you have a quite full C: drive on Windows but an extra D: drive with lots of space available in the GUI Installer.

If you are an expert user and have good reason to chose a custom directory for $IDE_ROOT we still give you the freedom to do so.
We only do not recommend or encourage to do this because we do not think it is a good idea in general.

Customisation

You can change the user environment variable IDE_ROOT to a directory of your choice as this variable is used by IDEasy and defines where IDEasy looks for projects.

But you need to follow following directory conventions for IDE_ROOT:

• the directory name should not contain any whitespaces
• the directory name is written in lowercase
• the directory location is not within a system path which requires special permissions e.g. C:\Program Files
• the directory location should not be on your desktop, your Downloads folder or the temporary directory.

To install to this custom location follow these steps:

• Create the desired location as empty directory on your machine
• Globally set the variable IDE_ROOT on your system to that absolute path
• After this change applied to your system (new IDE_ROOT variable is visible in all your shells, etc.), you install IDEasy (on the commandline).

Please do not ask for support or report bugs if you are causing errors because of too long or odd paths you have chosen.

Side-Note

We already discussed that we could separate the actual installation of IDEasy itself from $IDE_ROOT.
However, we decided against this since it prevents or dramatically complicates the upgrade mechanism and introduces additional complexity and source of potential bugs.
Instead we assume that $IDE_ROOT/_ide/installation is the path to IDEasy while$IDE_ROOT/$yourproject is the path to your project so we follow KISS.

See also this question about changing the installation path to prevent Windows drive out of disc space issues.