Maven Tips

This page collects various things learned about Maven and tips on how we use it.

Parent Poms

These can serve as a common spot to put shared things inherited by child poms.
These can serve as a place to specify (in the <modules> element) children to recursively process.

• These two functions need not be the same POM, but are in our current implementation
• You can install the shared, parent POM without running the install on the children by using the parameter -N, e.g.
  • mvn -N install
    This will install the parent to your local repository (which you need to do if you change it) without running the install on the children.

The mvn command

The mvn command documention appears when you type mvn -help. Besides the options, it takes 0 or more goals to run, and/or 0 or more life-cycle phases to run. If given a life cycle phase, such as "install", it runs all the previous phases in the life cycle, up to that point. If given a goal, such as "eclipse:eclipse", it may run life-cycle phases up to a specified point, depending on the goal implementation. For eclipse:eclipse, the documentation says it runs the phase "generate-resources" - meaning it runs all the life cycle phases up to that point.