MojoHaus Reusable IDE preferences plugin

This plugin allows simple management of IDE preferences by deploying them as Maven artifacts and allowing them to be applied using Maven goals.

Packaging IDE preferences

The first step is packaging the IDE preferences. Currently the only supported type is eclipse-formatter. The artifact must have a packaging type of eclipse-formatter and configure the eclipse-preferences-maven-plugin with extensions set to true. The sample project sample-eclipse-formatter exemplifies how this should work.

Applying IDE preferences

Once the IDE preferences are packaged and deployed to a Maven repository, in any Maven project you can apply the following configuration:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
    <artifactId>eclipse-preferences-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>0.0.3-SNAPSHOT</version>
    <extensions>true</extensions>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <phase>generate-resources</phase>
            <goals>
                <goal>configure</goal>
            </goals>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

Additionally, include a dependency on your formatter.

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
    <artifactId>demo</artifactId>
    <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
    <type>eclipse-formatter</type>
</dependency>

When the project is built using the Maven CLI or when the project is imported in Eclipse, the preferences will be applied. For performance reasons, refreshing the dependency does not automatically trigger an update in Eclipse, you will need to manually update the Maven project using the Maven → Update Project... command.

Additional configuration

The plug-in also allows easy configuration of other IDE settings. The example below configures Eclipse Mylyn to automatically set the commit message and associate the project to a task repository.

<configuration>
    <repository>
        <kind>jira</kind>
        <url>https://issues.apache.org/jira</url>
    </repository>
    <commitTemplate>\n\nBug: ${task.key} ( ${task.description} )</commitTemplate>
</configuration>

Building

To build the Maven plug-in, use mvn install. To also build the samples, make sure that the plug-in is installed or available in a remote Maven repository and run mvn install -Psamples -Denforcer.skip. The reason for this more complicated invocation is that the samples reference a -SNAPSHOT version of the plugin, which does not work for build extensions and is also blocked by the maven-enforcer-plugin configuration. This limitation will be removed after a first release.