Question

i am new to maven and came across the resources section. The reference for the maven project descriptor (version 4.0) states that “this element describes all of the classpath resources associated with a project or unit tests” (link). However this description i do not understand/seems to abstract for me. Why would i want to describe classpath resources? How does it affect the projects lifecycle?

matthias

Answer 1

usually you have the src/main/resources folder which contains resources which will be packaged into a jar. This everything which is in the above folder will automatically be packaged into a jar and is accessible via getResource… Via the resources area in the pom you can filter files from their way src/main/resources to the target/classes folder.

<project>
  ...
  <name>My Resources Plugin Practice Project</name>
  ...
  <build>
    ...
    <resources>
      <resource>
        <directory>src/main/resources</directory>
      </resource>
      ...
    </resources>
    ...
  </build>
  ...
</project>

The lifecycle of Maven is not influenced by this.