Hands-On Microservices with Kotlin

Introduction to Maven goals

Maven supports the concept of plugins, a plugin will be attached to a certain phase using a goal, and when that phase is executed the goal is run, if the goal fails the phase fails.

For example, in a Kotlin project a Kotlin plugin will set a goal named compile that is attached to the compile phase, so when we run the compile phase, it will compile the Kotlin source code.

We could run a goal from a plugin directly using the format mvn plugin:goal, for example in our application we could do the following:

mvnw kotlin:compile

This will compile our Kotlin code, however if other plugins have attached goals to the compile phase they will not run since we are not executing the phase, just a goal.

Spring Boot provides ...