maven with eclipse error "Path must include project and resource name"

Question

I've recently started using maven with eclipse.

I've set up several projects and I've noticed that if I try and specify a build directory (to over-ride target) which is outside the project directory, I get an error when doing "update project":

'Updating Maven Project' has encountered a problem.

An internal error occurred during: "Updating MAven Project". Path must include project and resource name: /[my project name]

I need to build outside the project. How can I get around this? Can I perhaps have maven automatically create a softlink?

Answer 1

Although this is a fairly old thread, I recently encountered this problem and was able to solve it. The reason why maven threw this error is I had, somewhere in my pom.xml file, an absolute path that was not consistent with the directory from which the project was imported into eclipse. So I had two absolute paths (one incorrect, or points to a previous location) that point to resources, i.e. project.build.outputDirectory, in the pom.xml file.

The Solution: Locate the faulty absolute path, /home/userA/ProjectB/bin, and replace with a relative, ./bin, path. Update the project in eclipse and you should be fine.

Answer 2

This is a bit old thread, but since nobody gave a correct answer...

The following Eclipse error:

An internal error occurred during: "Updating Maven Project".
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Path must include project and resource name:
    at org.eclipse.core.runtime.Assert.isLegal(Assert.java:63)
    at org.eclipse.core.internal.resources.Workspace.newResource(Workspace.java:2069)
    at ...

can occur in many different scenarios - in the Eclipse Bugzilla you can find a lot of similar bug reports.

In situation you described, it is a known limitation. But it's not a m2e fault - simply Eclipse JDT does not allow setting output dir outside of the project.
IMHO it's a pity, because if maven supports a such layout, so I would expect that m2e should as well.

I've reported it as a bug 493229. But it has been closed with status WONTFIX.

Answer 3

To answer the last paragraph in your question, you can get around the problem with a softlink. I did it a little differently than what you guessed at. It's not Maven that creates the symlink because this is a problem with Eclipse JDT (as others have pointed out) which runs without invoking Maven at times (it seems). Here's what I did, with all paths relative to my Maven project directory:

1) I wanted my actual build directory to be "../../local/java/scratch/target"

2) I created a softlink: ln -s ../../local ./

3) I added this entry to my "pom.xml":

<build>
  <directory>${project.basedir}/local/java/scratch/target</directory>
</build>

Now Eclipse JDT happily thinks it's building within the project directory but in reality the path "../../" takes it outside of the project directory. My guess is that an absolute path would have worked too.