Maven Archetypes Part 2: How do I create my first jar?

introduction and review

Before you start with this article, you need to have a basic understanding of Maven archetypes or have read the first article in my guide.  If you haven't, I have a feeling most of this won't make sense to you.

That said, let's start off with a quick review.  In the last article, we left things with an archetype layout of:

This is the most basic archetype you can really have; all it does is create a pom artifact. Typically, you won't be interested in generating a pom from an archetype; you'll want to at least create a jar, and potentially a multi-module project. For the next step, let's create our first jar.

Updating the project pom file to create a jar

Before we start to add files for our archetype, let's update src/main/resources/archetype-resources/pom.xml to change the packaging to jar. Let's also add a dependency on junit so that we can package a unit test in the project that's created, as well as the compiler setting:

Creating the necessary directories and updating the archetype metadata

Next, let's add the default directories that Maven projects use. I've added __packageInPathFormat__ as a subdirectory of both the main and test paths. When you generate a project from an archetype, Maven will create the property packageInPathFormat for you, which changes all of the dots in a package name to slashes. For example, if you have a package of com.theotherian, the packageInPathFormat property will be com/theotherian.

We also need to update the src/main/resources/META-INF/maven/archetype-metadata.xml file so that it knows to include and filter our new directories:

creating a basic Java class and a unit test

Now that we have our directories set up, let's create some source code.
First, let's add your standard "Hello world!" Java class in the file src/main/resources/archetype-resources/src/main/java/__packageInPathFormat__/App.java:

Next, let's add a basic unit test just to flesh things out a bit more at src/main/resources/archetype-resources/src/test/java/__packageInPathFormat__/AppTest.java:

Wrapping things up

Now that we've added all of this additional stuff, let's do a quick recap of the project layout:

If your project looks like that, go ahead and install the archetype and go back a directory.

creating a project from the archetype

Let's generate another project from our local archetype (if you haven't included this archetype in your local catalog, follow the steps in part 1):

Our project from the archetype has been created, so let's try building it:

Awesome, you've got an archetype building a jar!

But wait, there's more! Check out the next post in this series, which shows you how to build multi-module archetypes, to learn more!