Accessing resource files within your Eclipse plugins

Sometimes, especially in the development phase, you want to get your Eclipse Plugin's absolute file system location on the disk. Usually, you want to have a java.io.File. Since Eclipse mainly uses URLs to locate resources, it's not an easy one-liner to get the location. However, the utility class org.eclipse.core.runtime.FileLocator comes to the rescue:

URL bundleRoot = getBundle().getEntry("/");
URL fileURL = FileLocator.toFileURL(bundleRoot);
java.io.File file = new java.io.File(fileURL.toURI());

System.out.println("Bundle location:" + file.getAbsolutePath());

Note: please be aware that your plugin should be normally packaged as jar file and thus the above code does not work any more in a packaged deployment! To get this working, you must set the unpack attribute in your feature for the plugin.

What you really want to do is to use getBundle().getEntry("/file.txt").openStream() to get the contents of a file which is located within your plugin.

The code above is called from within a Plugin Activator class and uses the shortcut getBundle() method. If you need the code outside of an Activator class, use the Platform to resolve the bundle first. A one-liner looks like this:

new File(FileLocator.toFileURL(Platform.getBundle(
     pluginId).getEntry("/")).toURI());

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