How to create a maven archetype

When we try to create a maven project into a java IDE (eclipse, netbeans...), it asks which archetype to use. Of course we can use the default archetype provided by the IDE. In this article I will try to detail how to create our own archetype.

First, we create a simple maven project, with eclipse new -> other -> maven:

After that we modify the pom.xml, automatically generated by eclipse like the following:

<project xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
         xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
         xsi:schemalocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0
                             http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
 <modelversion>4.0.0</modelversion>
 <groupid>com.blogger.archetype</groupid>
 <artifactid>brmoez</artifactid>
 <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
 <packaging>maven-archetype</packaging>
 <name>My archetype creator</name>

 <build>
  <extensions>
   <extension>
    <groupid>org.apache.maven.archetype</groupid>
    <artifactid>archetype-packaging</artifactid>
    <version>2.0</version>
   </extension>
  </extensions>
  <plugins>
   <plugin>
    <artifactid>maven-archetype-plugin</artifactid>
    <version>2.0</version>
    <extensions>true</extensions>
   </plugin>
  </plugins>
 </build>
</project>

or use directly the command line:

archetype:generate -DarchetypeGroupId=com.blogger.archetype -DarchetypeArtifactId=myarchetype-creator
-DgroupId=com.blogger -Dpackage=com.blogger.brmoez -DartifactId=brmoez


Second, we can add some classes or resource files to be generated automatically when creating a project and setting the archetype myarchetype-creator, we can also add some parameters (required properties) to be given to the archetype when creating the project.

The files will be added under src/main/resources.
The parameters of the archetype will be configured in the archetype descriptor, for example:

<archetype-descriptor name="brmoez">
        <!-- required properties -->
 <requiredProperties>
  <requiredProperty key="property_1" />
  <requiredProperty key="property_2">
   <defaultValue>value_2</defaultValue>
  </requiredProperty>
 </requiredProperties>
        
        <!-- fileSets -->
 <fileSets>
  <fileSet filtered="true" packaged="true" encoding="UTF-8">
   <directory>src/main/java</directory>
   <includes>
    <include>**/*.java</include>
   </includes>
  </fileSet>
  <fileSet filtered="true" encoding="UTF-8">
   <directory>src/main/resources</directory>
   <includes>
    <include>**/*.properties</include>
                                <include>**/*.xml</include>
    <include>META-INF/*</include>
   </includes>
  </fileSet>
  <fileSet filtered="true" packaged="true" encoding="UTF-8">
   <directory>src/test/java</directory>
   <includes>
    <include>**/*</include>
   </includes>
  </fileSet>

  <fileSet filtered="true" encoding="UTF-8">
   <directory>src/test/resources</directory>
   <includes>
    <include>**/*</include>
   </includes>
  </fileSet>
 </fileSets>
</archetype-descriptor>