A behavior that annoyed me for some time was that Eclipse disabled autobuild (“Project -> Build Automatically”) on startup, no matter whether it was active during a previous, regular shutdown of the workspace.

I was unable to find a suitable setting in the workspace settings.

Finally, it turned out that the described behavior can be turned off (and on), by modifying an Eclipse Oomph configuration file as follows:

  1. Navigate to HOME/.eclipse/org.eclipse.oomph.setup/setups .
  2. Open the XML file user.setup .
  3. Navigate to a setupTask XML element with the key /instance/org.eclipse.core.resources/description.autobuilding , and set the value to true.

In my settings file, the corresponding XML fragment looks like this:

<setupTask
  xsi:type="setup:CompoundTask"
  name="org.eclipse.core.resources">
  <setupTask
    xsi:type="setup:PreferenceTask"
    key="/instance/org.eclipse.core.resources/description.autobuilding"
    value="true"/>
  <setupTask
    xsi:type="setup:PreferenceTask"
    key="/instance/org.eclipse.core.resources/encoding"
    value="UTF-8"/>
  <setupTask
    xsi:type="setup:PreferenceTask"
    key="/instance/org.eclipse.core.resources/refresh.lightweight.enabled"
    value="true"/>
</setupTask>