To ensure that you have all the components that are necessary for building BIRT, first install a working version of BIRT Report Designer. Ensure that all the plug‑ins and auxiliary files BIRT requires are present and that these resources are the versions the source code requires.

The simplest and surest way to know that you have all the necessary components of a working BIRT installation is to choose the Full Eclipse Install (All-in-One) option.

After installing BIRT, launch Eclipse and open the Report Design perspective. Verify that you can build a simple report and that you can preview the report in the web viewer. Typically, this test is sufficient to guarantee that you have a valid working version of BIRT. Of course, you can run more extensive tests to confirm access to any custom items in your environment, for example, custom data sources.