Question: I'm finding it difficult to phrase this question well, as there are quite a few generic terms (run, configuration, launch, etc.). Here goes:

You can [save run configurations in a `.launch` file](http://eclipsesnippets.blogspot.com/2007/07/tip-creating-and-sharing-launch.html). (in the Run Configuration Dialog, under the Common tab, Save as a shared file.

We check these in to SVN. The developers can pass them around, and it helps getting new devs running a working application quicker.

I'd like to check these out as part of our build and use them to programatically run the application, the tests, etc, without spinning up the whole IDE.

What would be the best way to run a `.launch` file outside of the UI? 

**Edit**: I am trying to unify the tests run on the build server and the IDE. I do not 
particularly want to give up integrated debugging, which would be the case with an ant script to run the tests .

This is probably more a problem for integration testing with multiple bundles, or unit testing a whole bundle, where you'd like to mock up extensions.

Answer: 
there is an eclipse plugin built over JUnit, called TPTP. It provides an automation client which can be used to launch the test from eclipse with no gui. maybe it helps
Perhaps running the configurations the way you would run your own custom run configurations would help here. It is described in [this article](http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-Launch-Framework/launch.html).