Eclipse .metadata\.plugins disk space

Question

Eclipse's .metadata/.plugins seems to consume way too much space (235 MB), is there something I can safely throw away and still be happy?

I archive my source root, and this seems to take away all my space. This is a project with several Java projects.

Answer 1

The plugins store your workspace configuration. If you delete them then your workspace may become unusable.

Depending on your plugins used and what you are doing you can probably delete some of them. Personally I'm regularly cleaning some of the plugins.

What I delete:

1. maven repository files/indexes
2. project indexes
3. Copies of deployed files to application servers.

I'd suggest you get a tool like WinDirStat and check, which plugins use up your space and maybe by name e.g. index you figure out that this plugin can be safely deleted.

Answer 2

In my case 85% of the workspace is occupied by the m2e plugin indexes. More information on that can be found in this thread. You can disable it by adjusting plugin configuration parameters as shown on the image bellow:

Then you can remove .metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.m2e.core/nexus directory from your workspace.

Answer 3

Generally web apps are deployed in one of the directories in .metadata and that's generallay the reason of large size

.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.wst.server.core

Answer 4

There is stuff associated with launch configs in .metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.pde.core/. This can often accumulate a lot and can be safely deleted.