Packaging Types

Tycho defines the following custom Maven packaging types targeted for Eclipse Plug-in development.

• eclipse-plugin corresponds to Eclipse Plug-in and Plug-in Fragment projects.
• eclipse-test-plugin is similar to eclipse-plugin but only contains Plugin Tests to be executed inside an OSGi runtime. There is a noticable difference between eclipse-plugin and eclipse-test-plugin with respect to the goal executed during integration-test. The former uses tycho-surefire-plugin:integration-test while the latter uses tycho-surefire-plugin:test.
• eclipse-feature corresponds to Eclipse Feature projects
• eclipse-repository corresponds to projects containing a category.xml file, the support of [Eclipse Update Site projects]https://github.com/eclipse-pde/eclipse.pde/blob/master/docs/User_Guide.md#Update-Site) has been removed in latest Tycho versions
• eclipse-target-definition corresponds to Eclipse Target Platform
• p2-installable-unit corresponds to Installable Units

The lifecycle bindings (i.e. which Maven plugins are executed in which Maven phase by default) are defined by tycho-maven-plugin in a Maven extension therefore it needs to be loaded accordingly:

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.apache.tycho</groupId>
  <artifactId>tycho-maven-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>${project.version}</version>
  <extensions>true</extensions>
</plugin>

All bindings are defined in https://github.com/eclipse-tycho/tycho/blob/master/tycho-maven-plugin/src/main/resources/META-INF/plexus/components.xml. Only the default lifecycle has custom bindings, i.e. the clean and site lifecycles behave as for every other packaging.

The according artifact handlers (i.e. the mapping from the packaging type to a specific extension) are provided by p2-maven-plugin in https://github.com/eclipse-tycho/tycho/tree/master/p2-maven-plugin/src/main/java/org/eclipse/tycho/p2maven/repository. When referencing one of the packaging types as Maven dependency it needs to be loaded with extensions as well:

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.apache.tycho</groupId>
  <artifactId>p2-maven-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>${project.version}</version>
  <extensions>true</extensions>
</plugin>