Maven: The Definitive Guide

Maven Preferences

The ability to adjust the Maven preferences and some Maven options is an important aspect of developing with Maven, and m2eclipse offers the ability to tweak these items via the Maven preferences page inside of Eclipse. Typically, when using Maven on the command line, such preferences and options are available from files in your ~/.m2 directory and as command-line options. m2eclipse provides access to some of the most important preferences and options from the Eclipse IDE. Figure 14-36 shows the Maven preferences page in Eclipse.

Figure 14-36. Maven preferences for Eclipse

The checkboxes in the top section of Figure 14-36 provide you with the ability to:

• Run Maven in offline mode, disabling any downloads from remote repositories

• Enable debug output in the Maven console

• Download source JARs for artifacts from remote Maven repositories

• Download Javadoc JARs for artifacts from remote Maven repositories

• Download and update local indexes for remote repositories on startup

The next section offers a pop-up menu to select which goal you’d like to be executed when a project is imported and when the source folders for a given project are updated. The default goal is named process-resources, which copies and process the resources for the project into the destination directory to make the project ready for packaging. Customizing this list of goals can come in handy if you need ...