Maven: A Developer's Notebook

Listing Available Goals

When you use Maven, you will be executing goals. A Maven plug-in is a set of related goals. For example, to create a JAR from a project, you would execute the jar:jar goal from the JAR plug-in as follows:

C:\dev\mavenbook\code\genapp> maven jar:jar

The jar before the colon separator classifies this goal as belonging to the JAR plug-in. To see a list of all the goals in the JAR plug-in, enter the following command:

C:\dev\mavenbook\code\genapp> maven -P jar
 _ _  _ _
|  \/  |_ _ _Apache_ _ _ _ _
| |\/| / _` \ V / -_) ' \  ~ intelligent projects ~
|_|  |_\_ _,_|\_/\_ _ _|_||_|  v. 1.0.2
  
Goals in jar
=  =  =  =  =  =  =  =  =  =  =  =
  
[jar]                               Create the deliverable jar file.
  deploy  ......................... Deploy a jar to the remote repository
  deploy-snapshot  ................ Deploy a snapshot jar to the remote
                                    repository
  install  ........................ Install the jar in the local repository
  install-snapshot  ............... Install a snapshot jar in the local
                                    repository
  jar  ............................ Create the deliverable jar file.
  snapshot  ....................... Create a snapshot jar, ie '
                                    id-YYYYMMDD.hhmmss.jar'
  
Plugin for creating JAR files. Requires Maven 1.0 RC2.

If you need to see a list of every available plug-in and goal, type the following:

C:\dev\mavenbook\code\genapp\test-application> maven -g | more

The entire list of plug-ins is a little daunting, as Maven has plug-ins for just about everything, from generating project files for different IDEs to generating WAR ...