Import Tycho “pomless” project into Eclipse

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We have a project based on Maven Tycho and we recently eliminated all these seemingly redundant pom.xml files. The command line build works fine, so this seemed like a good improvement to remove useless clutter.

Later we found out that these projects cannot be easily imported into Eclipse any more -- at least not the way we were used to. So far, we used the import “Existing Maven Projects” command and all directories which contained a pom.xml got imported. As there are not pom.xml files any more, this does not work. D’oh!

What’s the recommended way to import pomless Tycho projects into Eclipse?

tycho pom.xml maven eclipse
1 Answers

The Maven import is only for (plain Java) projects that contain a pom.xml file, not for projects that will be build with Tycho (independent whether they are POM-less or not).

A Maven build with the Maven plugin Tycho behaves quite differently than a regular Maven build. Resolving dependencies, downloading dependencies and compiling is done by Tycho and also the phases differ from a regular Maven build. You need some basic OSGi knowledge (where in contrast to Maven, dependencies are also resolved at runtime since bundles/plugins can be started and stopped at runtime). The vogella company provides a quite good Tycho tutorial with a sample Git repository which might a good start (requires basic OSGi knowledge): Maven Tycho for building Eclipse plug-ins, OSGi bundles and Eclipse applications with the command line - Tutorial

A .project file per project is needed to be able to import such Plug-in, Fragment, Feature, Update Site, etc. projects e.g.

  • in the Git Repositories view, by right-clicking a repository and choosing Import Projects... or
  • via File > Open Projects from File System....

If you have lost the .project files, copy them from a project of the same kind/nature and adapt <name>...</name> (this is the name that is shown in Eclipse, in most cases the name of the project folder, and it must be unique; two projects with the same name cannot be opened).

A Plug-in project that contains Java code also needs a .classpath file, which you can add in the same way after importing.

By not sharing the .settings folders you lost the settings that can be done in Project > Properties (it is recommended to have project specific settings at least for Java Compiler and Java Compiler > Errors/Warnings).

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