Maven: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 12. Maven Assemblies

Introduction

Maven provides plugins that are used to create the most common archive types, most of which are consumable as dependencies of other projects. Some examples include the JAR, WAR, EJB, and EAR plugins. As discussed in Chapter 10, these plugins correspond to different project packaging types, each with slightly different build processes. Although Maven has plugins and customized lifecycles to support standard packaging types, there are times when you’ll need to create an archive or directory with a custom layout. Such custom archives are called Maven Assemblies.

There are any number of reasons why you may want to build custom archives for your project. Perhaps the most common is the project distribution. The word “distribution” means many different things to different people (and projects), depending on how the project is meant to be used. Essentially, these are archives that provide a convenient way for users to install or otherwise make use of the project’s releases. In some cases, this may mean bundling a web application with an application server like Jetty. In others, it could mean bundling API documentation alongside source and compiled binaries like JAR files. Assemblies usually come in handy when you are building the final distribution of a product. For example, products such as Nexus (introduced in Chapter 16) are the result of large, multimodule Maven projects, and the final archive you download from Sonatype was created ...