The Eclipse plugin can generate the project files necessary to import the project in Eclipse. In this section, we will see the tasks that are added by the plugin and how to customize the generated output.

If we have a Java project and we want to import the project into Eclipse, we must use the Eclipse plugin to generate the Eclipse project files. Each Eclipse project has a .project and .classpath file as minimum. The .project file contains the metadata about the project, such as the project name. The .classpath file contains classpath entries for the project. Eclipse needs this in order to be able to compile the source files in the project. The Eclipse plugin will try to download the artifact with source files belonging to a dependency as well. So, if we import the project into Eclipse and the source files are available, we can directly see the source of dependent class files.

For a Java project, an additional Java Development Tools (JDT) configuration file is created...