Maven is a project manager, not a build manager like Ant, hence the pom.xml file (Project object model). It tries to use a certain format to where the files are on the system to make it simpler to include dependencies.

$ mvn archetype:generate

This generates a simple template. archetype is the plugin, generate is the goal.

$ mvn help:effective-pom

This generates the entire POM that includes the minimal pom.xml including any parent POMs, user settings, and active profiles.

Maven doesn’t know how to compile your code or make a JAR file, but the plugins it uses do. Basic maven is a basic shell that knows how to:

parse the command-line manage a classpath parse a POM file download Maven plugins Maven Lifecycle Plugin goals can be attached to lifecycle phases (e.g. install, test). Each phase may have 0 or more goals attached to it. Example phases:

• process-resources
• compile
• process-classes
• process-test-resources
• test-compile
• test
• prepare-package
• package

When mvn fires is launches all phases before it in the lifecycle.

You can also just specify the plugin goals, but that is a lot more tedious

$ mvn resources:resources compiler:compile resources:testResources surefire:test jar:jar install:install

4 (really 5) definitions create the coordinate system for a product:

1. groupId - reverse domain name
2. artifactId - unique identifier under the group representing a single project
3. packaging - package type (jar, war, ear)
4. version - a specific release of a project
5. classifier (rarely used)

Maven download artifacts and plugins from a remote repository to a your local machine and stores them in your local Maven repository (~/.m2/repository). install phase installs a .jar into the local repository. A repository contains the .jar and the .pom of what it depends on.

You can generate a site and documentation by doing the following:

$ mvn site

Generates javadoc, and other custom reports

This can tell you what all of the dependencies are:

$ mvn dependency:resolve

A prettier way to see the dependency tree

$ mvn dependency:tree

I got a lot of useful information for this post from Maven By Example