Apache Maven – Plugins explanation

December 27, 2014 SJ Apache Maven 0

In earlier articles we have seen about Maven’s different lifecycles and their various build phases. Now we will extend these articles to understand, what is the role of plugins in executions of various build phases like compile, test, install, deploy, etc

Plugins explanation:

  • With every build phases, there is always a plugins associated with it and this is applicable for all three built-in lifecycles of Maven
  • It means every time when we execute any of the build phase, then actually a goal configured in the plugins gets executed at the background implicitly and this is not configured exclusively in the pom.xml
  • Reason: We need these build phases to get executed in the sequence as defined in the Maven’s lifecycle. So configuring each and every plugins with their goals is quite cumbersome for this default behavior [means maven provides these plugins on-the-fly with their associated goals, when we execute any of the build phase]
  • For instance, we will consider default lifecycle of Maven and understand what are the plugins associated with every build phase
  • Syntax: [plugin:name]:[goal-name]
Build Phaseplugins:goal
compilecompiler:compile
testsurefire:test
packagejar:jar (depending on the POM element <packaging>)
installinstall:install
deploydeploy:deploy
  • Note: Plugins just instructs, actually configured goals in the plugins gets executed
  • All we learnt so far is the default behavior, now we will move on to understand how we can manually configure <plugins> under <build> section of pom.xml
  • Sometime, we need extra bit of work to be done in addition to the default behavior. So to achieve this, we can manually configure <plugins> in pom.xml
  • For instance, we will consider jaxws plugins
<plugin>
	<groupId>org.jvnet.jax-ws-commons</groupId>
	<artifactId>jaxws-maven-plugin</artifactId>
	<version>2.3</version>
	<executions>
		<execution>
			<id>basic</id>
			<phase>generate-sources</phase>
			<goals>
				<goal>wsimport</goal>
			</goals>
		</execution>
	</executions>
	<configuration>
		<keep>true</keep>
		<wsdlDirectory>${basedir}\src\main\resources</wsdlDirectory>
		<wsdlFiles>
			<wsdlFile>com\jaxws\series\top\down\approach\services\BookService.wsdl
			</wsdlFile>
		</wsdlFiles>
		<sourceDestDir>${basedir}\generated\java\source</sourceDestDir>
		<verbose>true</verbose>
		<target>2.1</target>
	</configuration>
</plugin>
  • Plugin –> jaxws
  • Goal   –> wsimport
  • Phase –> generate-sources

Above plugin in which configured “wsimport” goal reads the WSDL file from location specified and generates jax-ws classes at “generate-sources” build phase of the Maven’s default lifecycle

Note:  With <phase> tag, we can specify at which step of the lifecycle this needs to be executed

Useful Eclipse IDE shortcuts :

Related Articles:

References:

Happy Coding !!
Happy Learning !!

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