Question

I’ve been given the task of speeding up a large maven build, and while I’ve worked with Ant quite a bit I’m new to Maven.

Looking through the various pom.xml files I see plugins, but I can’t tell what they do. If I go to https://repository.sonatype.org/index.html#welcome and type the various plugin names I get pretty much everything except a description of what the plugin does.

Is there a way to tell what a maven plugin does?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can use the help plugin to get a description for Maven plugins (if they provide it):

mvn help:describe -Dplugin=org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-compiler-plugin

yields

Name: Maven Compiler Plugin
Description: The Compiler Plugin is used to compile the sources of your project.
Group Id: org.apache.maven.plugins
Artifact Id: maven-compiler-plugin
Version: 2.3.2
Goal Prefix: compiler

This plugin has 3 goals:

compiler:compile
  Description: Compiles application sources

...

If you want to have even more, then add -Ddetail to the command line:

mvn help:describe -Dplugin=<groupid>:<artifactid> -Ddetail