How To Manually Add Project To Eclipse Without Using Eclipse

Question

I'd like to manually create the folders/files on the file system that create a new project in a workspace in eclipse, and show up in the Project Explorer when eclipse is started and the workspace is selected.

What files would need to be created to do this and where would they need to be?

Please understand that I do not want to open eclipse and make a new project using eclipse. I want to make a new project without using eclipse.

Answer 1

I think you will need to do the following

• create a .project file and whatever other files needed by your specific type of project (for example java projects need .classpath) in the project folder, you can find out what you need by looking at those files for another project.
• In your workspace .metadata folder, this is where eclipse keeps information about the current workspace, I think the plugin responsible for project definition is .metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.resources , you will need to create those files yourself, some of them are binary, so you will need to open up the source of that plugin to see exactly how it writes them. Depending on your project, you will need to write more .metadata plugin information (for maven for example).

Answer 2

There is no easy way of doing this. Each new project modifies many scattered files throughout the eclipse structure (if you want a list, make a new project and find files created/modified most recently, and/or search for the project name.)

Short of writing the files by hand, there's not much you can do. I found these links in my reseach, but they're both pretty old and seem to be dead ends: http://www.eclipsezone.com/eclipse/forums/t107019.html http://dev.eclipse.org/newslists/news.eclipse.tools/msg36546.html