Maven Tutorial - Maven Plugins

Maven is actually a plugin container.

Each task is done by a plugin.

We can use Maven Plugins to:

compile source code files
create jar file
create war file
run unit testing
create project documentation
create project reports

Syntax

We can use the following syntax to execute a plugin and its goal.

mvn [plugin-name]:[goal-name]

The following code uses maven-compiler-plugin's compile-goal to compile a Java project.

mvn compiler:compile

Plugin Types

Maven provided following two types of Plugins:

Type	Description
Build plugins	execute during the build and they should be configured in the <build/> element from the pom.xml file.
Reporting plugins	execute during the site generation and they should be configured in the <reporting/> element from the pom.xml.

Common plugins

The following table lists a few of common plugins.

Plugin	Description
clean	Clean up after the build.
compiler
	Compiles Java sources.
deploy	Deploy the built artifact to the remote repository.
failsafe	Run the JUnit tests in an isolated classloader.
install	Copy the built artifact into the local repository.
resources	Copy the resources to the output directory for including in the JAR.
site	Generate a site for the current project.
ear	Generate an EAR from the current project.

Example

The following pom.xml file shows how to config executions to output text.

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0
    http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
<modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
<groupId>com.java2s.project</groupId>
<artifactId>simpleCode</artifactId>
<version>1.0</version>
<build>
<plugins>
   <plugin>
   <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
   <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
   <version>1.1</version>
   <executions>
      <execution>
         <id>id.clean</id>
         <phase>clean</phase>
         <goals>
            <goal>run</goal>
         </goals>
         <configuration>
            <tasks>
               <echo>hi from plugin.</echo>
            </tasks>
         </configuration>
      </execution>     
   </executions>
   </plugin>
</plugins>
</build>
</project>

Save the code above to c:\mvn_test, open command console and go to c:\mvn_test execute the following mvn command.

C:\mvn_text>mvn clean