Maven: The Definitive Guide

Maven Installation Details

Maven’s download measures in at roughly 1.5 MiB.^[1] It has attained such a slim download size because the core of Maven has been designed to retrieve plugins and dependencies from a remote repository on demand. When you start using Maven, it will start to download plugins to a local repository as described in the section User-Specific Configuration and Repository,” later in this chapter. In case you are curious, let’s take a quick look at what is in Maven’s installation directory:

/usr/local/maven $ ls -p1
LICENSE.txt
NOTICE.txt
README.txt
bin/
boot/
conf/
lib/

LICENSE.txt contains the software license for Apache Maven. This license is described in some detail later in the section About the Apache Software License.” NOTICE.txt contains some notices and attributions required by libraries that Maven depends on. README.txt contains some installation instructions. bin/ contains the mvn script that executes Maven. boot/ contains a JAR file (classwords-1.1.jar) that is responsible for creating the Class Loader in which Maven executes. conf/ contains a global settings.xml that can be used to customize the behavior of your Maven installation. If you need to customize Maven, it is customary to override any settings in a settings.xml file stored in ~/.m2. lib/ contains a single JAR file (maven-core-2.0.9-uber.jar) that contains the core of Maven.

User-Specific Configuration and Repository

Once you start using Maven extensively, you’ll notice that Maven has ...