Moving project to another folder in Eclipse

I generally have my working projects sitting on folders on my Desktop. When they are completed I just move them to a c:\dev\. The thing is I'm doing it in a rather archaic way.

1. move project files
2. delete project on Eclipse
3. create new project on Eclipse on the new location

How to you guys move projects around?

If I could alter the: File -> Properties -> Resource -> Location path it would be dead simple!

Example move:

c:\user\desktop\project_123
c:\dev\project_123

Right click on the Eclipse project in the Package Explorer, select Refactor, then select Move... In the dialog that comes up, enter or navigate to the new location and click OK. This will also preserve your CVS or other SCM metadata, but will also bring all your modifications as well, and you won't lose any memberships in Working Sets, launch configurations, or other things that Eclipse associates with your project.


Use Eclipse's Move menu item

Open Navigator view, right click on your project and click Move. Then select the destination directory.

Navigator View > Right Click > Move

Note it doesn't seem to work in Package Explorer (at least not in Neon). The move dialog from Package Explorer is different, so use the Navigator window.

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I don't know whether eclipse has made modifs since the date of this post... In my case I had moved a project folder manually and I wanted Eclipse to open the project on this new location. This is what I did (and it seems to work).

  • (I'm using eclipse "helios" v 3.6.2)

  • File menu | Import ...

  • General | Existing projects into Workspace

  • Select root directory = top directory of your project on the new location

  • Finish


I rarely have any projects in Eclipse that aren't under source control, so all I would need to do is check the project out in the new location.

If you don't have source control, Eclipse works with CVS rather well out of the box, and it's pretty simple to setup CVS to run locally without a server: http://www.tortoisecvs.org/faq.html#cvsinit