Portable Netbeans

I got a new USB stick today and decided to make a good IDE-on-the-go out of it. I installed XAMPP, my favorite text editor, FTP manager and than I came across my favorite IDE for python development – Netbeans… After about 3 hours of fighting with it I did actually make it portable

So what you need to do to make Netbeans portable:

1. First, copy already installed Netbeans to your USB stick. ( I recommend choosing a zipped version from here then simply unpack it)
2. Now there are 2 possible ways: editing a configuration file and applying commands to a shortcut. I’ll describe both:
   • 1st: find file netbeans.conf in directory etc\ inside a directory with Netbeans.  Now line
     

     netbeans_default_userdir="${HOME}/.netbeans/6.5"

     replace with

     netbeans_default_userdir=".\YOUR_USER_FOLDER"

     where YOUR_USER_FOLDER is a folder with different configs. It must not be in the same directory that your Netbeans is (it was my mistake).

     Now find line with something like

     netbeans_jdkhome="/path/to/jdk"

     it defines path  to a place where JDK is installed in your stick. Replace it with something like

     netbeans_jdkhome=".\JDK\"

     don’t forget to replace JDK with a valid for you path

   • 2nd: if you are using PStart or something similar to that make a shortcut for netbeans.exe and add commands:
     

      --jdkhome "%pdrive%\PATH_TO_JDK" --userdir "%pdrive%\PATH_TOU_USERDIR"

     where PATH_TO_JDK is a directory with JDK on your flash USB and PATH_TOU_USERDIR is your user directory. Again it must not be in the same directory that your Netbeans is.

And that’s it! Happy coding