Question

I have multi module project where one project contains excel spreadsheet and it is being dropped in the target folder when maven build the project. Now when I do a mvn clean install, sometime maven throws an error that it can not delete the “abc.xls” file. So I started using maven-clean-plugin and trying to exclude this file. Still I am getting the same error. Strange problem is, if i close my eclipse and do the build from command line then it works fine. But for that everytime i want to do clean build I have to close my eclipse. Also I am using M2ECLIPSE plugin for my project. Here is my maven-clean-plugin looks like

<plugin>
            <artifactId>maven-clean-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>2.4.1</version>
            <configuration>
                    <excludeDefaultDirectories>true</excludeDefaultDirectories>
                    <filesets>
                        <fileset>
                            <directory>${basedir}/target/classes/</directory>
                            <excludes>
                                <exclude>**/*.xls</exclude>
                            </excludes>
                            <followSymlinks>true</followSymlinks>
                        </fileset>
                    </filesets>
                    <!-- <failOnError>false</failOnError> -->
            </configuration>
        </plugin>

Any insight would be helpful.

Thanks

Answer 1

That’s not how to configure the clean plugin.

You need to turn on excludeDefaultDirectories and then write a fileset that covers what you want with exclusions. What you’ve just done is redundantly add target/classes, but that’s added on top of deleting ‘target’ with no exclusions.