Maven

Maven is a build tool for Java projects.

Concepts

• Projects are the units of work Maven manages.
  • The POM (pom.xml) file is the core of a Maven project's configuration.
  • Project inheritance allows POMs to inherit from other POMs.
    • By default, all POMs inherit the Super POM, unless the /project/parent element is specified.
  • Project aggregation is similar to inheritance, but specifies a child module (/project/modules/module) in the parent POM instead
• A BOM is a type of POM specifying dependencies which may itself be included for these transitive dependencies, centralising their management across numerous projects.
• Goals are similar to tasks in other build systems, and may accept parameters using the -D CLI argument. Goals are namespaced by the ID of the plugin which provides them.
• Plugins provide goals or report types.
• Profiles as per-project, per-user, or global configurations which can be used to override portions of a POM.
• Phases define the categories of goals with a project's build lifecycle. Different packaging types will map different goals to different phases.
• Archetypes provide predefined templates which accept some user input to generate a skeleton project.
• A repository contains built artifacts and dependencies.
  • Each user's local repository caches artifacts and dependencies to speed up subsequent installation.
  • A remote repository may be accessed over a network.
• Maven uses two fields to identify projects:
  • groupId is typically set to the organisation name.
  • artifactId is used to identify the project, relative to the groupId.

CLI

mvn:

• -B or --batch-mode is non-interactive.
• -D<property>=<value> or --define <property>=<value> set a system property value.
• -P profile1,profile2 specifies a comma-delimited set of profiles to activate.
• -o or --offline forces use of dependencies cached in the local repository.

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Backlinks

• Dependencies (public)