Generating the build.xml file

Open a Navigator view and locate your new plug-in project.

  1. Select the file 'plugin.xml' underneath your new project and right-click PDE Tools > Create Ant Build File.
  2. A new file, 'build.xml' will be created underneath your project.
  3. Open the Ant editor on the build.xml file by double clicking it in the Navigator. Notice that for this file, the Ant editor is the default editor. This is because by default, there is a file association in the workbench preferences associating files named 'build.xml' with the Ant editor.
    default build.xml file

The build.xml file is a default Ant buildfile with many targets useful for deploying your plug-in. For example, there are individual targets to build all necessary jars for your plug-in, create a .zip file containing everything in your plug-in, cleanup any .zip files that may have been created and so on.

Now that we have the build.xml file, we will use it to build a .jar file for our plug-in.

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