Maven Eclipse Plugin and Eclipse PDE: The Right Configuration

pom.xml

As noted on the Maven Eclipse plugin website, a two additional plugins need to be added to the project‘s pom. These copy the dependencies‘ jar files into the project folder and remove them on the eclipse:clean command. I found it helpful to add a further antrun plugin, which copies the MANIFEST.MF file generated by the maven bundle plugin. Therewith, the following additions can be made to the pom.xml

                                                         maven\-dependency-plugin                                                                                                                          copy-dependencies                                                process-sources                                                                                                         copy-dependencies                                                                                                                                                         ${basedir}                                                        false                                                        false                                                        true                                                                                                                                                                                                         maven\-clean-plugin                                2.3                                                                                                                                                                                   ${basedir}                                                                                                                         \*.jar                                                                                                                false                                                                                                                                                                                                         maven\-antrun\-plugin                                                                                                                          package                                                                                                         run                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

Maven arguments

As mentioned before, Maven should be called with an additional argument to assure that the eclipse plugin does not attempt to define links between the eclipse plugins. One way of generating the eclipse meta-data is the following:

mvn eclipse:clean clean package eclipse:eclipse -Declipse.pde -Declipse.useProjectReferences=false install