What is an artifact and why does Maven need it?
An artifact is a file, usually a JAR, that gets deployed to a Maven repository.
A Maven build produces one or more artifacts, such as a compiled JAR and a "sources" JAR.
Each artifact has a group ID (usually a reversed domain name, like com.example.foo), an artifact ID (just a name), and a version string. The three together uniquely identify the artifact.
A project's dependencies are specified as artifacts.
In general software terms, an "artifact" is something produced by the software development process, whether it be software related documentation or an executable file.
In Maven terminology, the artifact is the resulting output of the maven build, generally a jar or war or other executable file. Artifacts in maven are identified by a coordinate system of groupId, artifactId, and version. Maven uses the groupId, artifactId, and version to identify dependencies (usually other jar files) needed to build and run your code.
I know this is an ancient thread but I wanted to add a few nuances.
There are Maven artifacts, repository manager artifacts and then there are Maven Artifacts.
A Maven artifact is just as other commenters/responders say: it is a thing that is spat out by building a Maven project. That could be a .jar file, or a .war file, or a .zip file, or a .dll, or what have you.
A repository manager artifact is a thing that is, well, managed by a repository manager. A repository manager is basically a highly performant naming service for software executables and libraries. A repository manager doesn't care where its artifacts come from (maybe they came from a Maven build, or a local file, or an Ant build, or a by-hand compilation...).
A Maven Artifact is a Java class that represents the kind of "name" that gets dereferenced by a repository manager into a repository manager artifact. When used in this sense, an Artifact is just a glorified name made up of such parts as groupId, artifactId, version, scope, classifier and so on.
To put it all together:
Your Maven project probably depends on several Artifacts by way of its <dependency> elements.
Maven interacts with a repository manager to resolve those Artifacts into files by instructing the repository manager to send it some repository manager artifacts that correspond to the internal Artifacts.
Finally, after resolution, Maven builds your project and produces a Maven artifact. You may choose to "turn this into" a repository manager artifact by, in turn, using whatever tool you like, sending it to the repository manager with enough coordinating information that other people can find it when they ask the repository manager for it.
Hope that helps.
Maven organizes its build in projects.
An artifact in maven is a resource generated by a maven project. Each maven project can have exactly one artifact like a jar, war, ear, etc.
The project's configuration file "pom.xml" describes how the artifact is build, how unit tests are run, etc.
Commonly a software project build with maven consists of many maven-projects that build artifacts (e.g. jars) that constitute the product.
E.g.
Root-Project // produces no artifact, simply triggers the build of the other projects
App-Project // The application, that uses the libraries
Lib1-Project // A project that creates a library (jar)
Lib2-Project // Another library
Doc-Project // A project that generates the user documentation from some resources
Maven artifacts are not limited to java resources. You can generate whatever resource you need. E.g. documentation, project-site, zip-archives, native-libraries, etc.
Each maven project has a unique identifier consiting of [groupId, artifactId, version]. When a maven project requires resources of another project a dependency is configured in it's pom.xml using the above-mentioned identifier. Maven then automatically resolves the dependencies when a build is triggered. The artifacts of the required projects are then loaded either from the local repository, which is a simple directory in your user's home, or from other (remote) repositories specified in you pom.xml.
Q. What is Artifact in maven?
ANS: ARTIFACT is a JAR,(WAR or EAR), but it could be also something else. Each artifact has,
a group ID (like com.your.package),
an artifact ID (just a name), and
a version string. The three together uniquely identify the artifact.
Q.Why does Maven need them?
Ans: Maven is used to make them available for our applications.
An artifact is a JAR or something that you store in a repository. Maven gets them out and builds your code.
To maven, the build process is arranged as a set of artifacts. Artifacts include:
The plugins that make up Maven itself.
Dependencies that your code depends on.
Anything that your build produces that can, in turn be consumed by something else.
Artifacts live in repositories.
usually we talking Maven Terminology about Group Id , Artifact Id and Snapshot Version
Group Id:identity of the group of the project
Artifact Id:identity of the project
Snapshot version:the version used by the project.
Artifact is nothing but some resulting file like Jar, War, Ear....
simply says Artifacts are nothing but packages.
Usually, when you create a Java project you want to use functionalities made in another Java projects.
For example, if your project wants to send one email you dont need to create all the necessary code for doing that. You can bring a java library that does the most part of the work.
Maven is a building tool that will help you in several tasks. One of those tasks is to bring these external dependencies or artifacts to your project in an automatic way ( only with some configuration in a XML file ).
Of course Maven has more details but, for your question this is enough.
And, of course too, Maven can build your project as an artifact (usually a jar file ) that can be used or imported in other projects.
This website has several articles talking about Maven :
https://connected2know.com/programming/what-is-maven/
https://connected2know.com/programming/maven-configuration/
An artifact is an element that a project can either use or produce. In Maven terminology, an artifact is an output generated after a Maven project build. It can be, for example, a jar, war, or any other executable file.
Also, Maven artifacts include five key elements, groupId, artifactId, version, packaging, and classifier. Those are the elements we use to identify the artifact and are known as Maven coordinates.
read it from here
Related
suppose I have a project say A which is dependent on B. so when I build project A. does maven generates the artifact of A by bundling with project B artifact?
and suppose if project B is dependent on C. then when I build project A, will it by default takes the transitive dependency c to generate the artifact? and even if it takes, what will happen if I add C as a dependency in project A pom.xml? will maven takes the C artifact for two times to build A and generates a bigger artifact file?
what will happen if I add C as a dependency in project A pom.xml?
If C's dependency has already been resolved, maven will simply ignore it if it is declared elsewhere.
will maven takes the C artifact for two times to build A and generates a
bigger artifact file?
No.
Please check https://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-dependency-mechanism.html#Transitive_Dependencies for more details.
Transitivity brings a very serious problem when different versions of the same artefacts are included by different dependencies. It may cause version mismatch issue in runtime. In this case, dependency:tree command is very useful in dealing with conflicts of JARs.
$ mvn dependency:tree
Check https://howtodoinjava.com/maven/maven-dependency-management/#dependency-tree for more details.
this question is a little bit broad, things can change a little with you start to talk about Maven multi-module projects (so there is a parent-child relationship between modules). I will assume that multi-module setups are off-topic for this question.
Also: IDEs have tight integration with Maven and might add additional automatic processes on top of it. I assume this is plain Maven as it would work from a shell.
finally: there is a big difference from working with dependencies you pull in from the internet and projects you are building yourself with Maven. I am going to limit this answer to only building your own projects when it comes to dependency management. Otherwise I'd be writing the Maven manual here.
suppose I have a project say A which is dependent on B. so when I
build project A. does maven generates the artifact of A by bundling
with project B artifact?
Maven will include whatever you put in the dependencies listing; if it cannot it will fail the build. If project B is your own project, it will not automatically build B for you when you are building project A, it will only try to include whatever jar is already in your local maven repository. If there is no jar in your local repository, it will try to download it from all the Maven repositories that are known within the project. This will fail if Project B is just a project living on your harddrive, the only way then to make the jar of Project B available for usage in Project A is to actually build and install Project B first so a copy of the jar is put in your local maven repository.
Similarly if project B changes but you do not change its Maven version number, it is your own responsibility to rebuild and install it so the existing jar in your local maven repository gets overwritten.
It is possible that the dependency jar of B is pushed to a remote repository; it could be that your company is hosting or licensing a Nexus or an Artifactory for example and development builds are pushed to a snapshot repository so it can be used by several developers on different machines without them having to checkout the project and build it on their own machine. Then it depends on how Maven is configured if it will eagerly download updated versions of the jar when building project A. If you are working with a remote repository and you suspect that during the build an older version of a dependent jar is being used, this existing question's answers detail a few ways to force dependency jars to be updated when they were already downloaded before. But you should hardly ever need to use that.
and suppose if project B is dependent on C. then when I build project
A, will it by default takes the transitive dependency c to generate
the artifact?
Yes it will walk the entire dependency tree and include all transitive dependencies.
and even if it takes, what will happen if I add C as a
dependency in project A pom.xml? will maven takes the C artifact for two times to build A and generates a bigger artifact file?
Well first of all: dependencies are not included in the jar of project A by default so the size of the jar does not depend on the number of dependencies the project has. You would have to specifically use a plugin that has this functionality, often called "one jarring", "creating a fat jar" or creating an "uber jar". The Maven Shade plugin is a common way to do this.
Regardless, Maven does not allow multiple copies of the same dependency groupId+artifactId pair to exist on the classpath and will filter out duplicate copies when it finds them. This also happens when you add the same artifact multiple times within the same pom, Maven will call you out on it and include only one copy.
So no, in the end there will be only one copy of C.jar. Even if the pom of A refers to C version 1.0 and the pom of B refers to C version 1.1.
Can a pom file uploaded to a remote repository via mvn deploy have a classifier in its name?
For example, if I have artifacts Webapp-1.0.war and Webapp-1.0-CLASSIFIER.war can I easily have Webapp-1.0.pom and Webapp-1.0-CLASSIFIER.pom?
I'd like to be able to deploy artifacts with multiple classifiers to the same repository, but the mvn deploy goal always fails because it's trying to upload a pom that's already there.
I don't want to use mvn deploy:deploy-file if I can avoid it because I don't want to unnecessarily complicate my CI build, i.e., having to specify file/url as configuration parameters because the file and url will change depending on whether I'm deploying a snapshot/release version.
Your problem is the understanding of Maven. If you produce an artifact which has an classifier it means having a pom which describes creating the artifact with the classifier as well as an artifact without an classifier. In other words your problem can be solved by having a single pom file. Furthermore you can deploy an artifact and several artifacts with classifiers with a single call to the maven-dependency-plugin call like the following:
mvn deploy:deploy-file
-DgroupId=com.soebes.test
-DartifactId=x1
-Dversion=2.7.5-SNAPSHOT
-Dfile=TheMainArtifact.jar
-Dclassifiers=first,second
-Dfiles=firstFile,secondFile
-Dtypes=zip,xml
-DrepositoryId=RepositoryId
-Durl=URLOfTheRepository
With the above (into a single line) you can deploy several files with a single deploy command without changing the configuration of Neuxs or any other repository manager to allow redeploying (wrong way!).
I've run into this before too. As far as I know, classified POMs aren't allowed.
The trick is to configure the remote repo to allow the POM to be updated while not allowing redeploy of other artifacts.
In Nexus, this is done through Repository Targets. The pattern to match POMs in a repository is .*/(?!.*\.pom).*. The target gets linked to Privileges, which may be assigned to Roles, which are then assigned to Users. (Memory is a little fuzzy here, I got this working and then decided to use deploy:deploy-file instead.)
There's no such thing as a classified pom. For every groupId + artifactId + version there's exactly one pom, and this pom is also used for the attached/classified artifacts. So this means that for instance that the main artifact and all the attached artifacts have the same dependencies.
Most used attached artifacts are javadoc and sources, for which this makes perfectly sense.
My Maven project uses a forked JAR of spring-security-oauth.
I'd like to add extra debugging statements, so I unzipped the spring-security-oauth-custom.jar.
But, when I navigated to the org/springframework/security/oauth/common/signature directory, I saw class files.
How can I use the source files instead since I can't modify the class files?
Artifacts in Maven are immutable. Assuming you let Maven grab spring-security-oauth-custom.jar from a Maven repository, you can't just edit the contents of the JAR file and expect things to work.
You'll have to do the following:
Download the source bundle for spring-security-oauth-custom.jar.
Expand the sources somewhere.
Make your modifications.
Create a new artifact out of this new module (including creating a new POM file for it, giving it unique Maven coordinations such as groupId, artifactId and version).
Install the new artifact in your own artifact repository.
Adjust your calling module (that is, the module calling spring-security-oauth-custom) to depend on your modified version, instead of the original.
To use a custom built JAR file like that you should deploy it in your local repository and use it as a regular dependency. You can either put it in your repository manually, or you can use the maven-install-plugin. Either way, you should create a unique version number for it so it does not "collide" with any official Spring artifacts.
I was given a maven project to compile and get deployed on a tomcat server. I have never used maven before today, but I have been googling quite a bit. It seems like the top level pom.xml files in this project have the packaging type set as pom.
What am I supposed to do after mvn install to get this application deployed? I was expecting to be able to find a war file somewhere or something, but I guess I am looking in the wrong place or missing a step.
pom is basically a container of submodules, each submodule is represented by a subdirectory in the same directory as pom.xml with pom packaging.
Somewhere, nested within the project structure you will find artifacts (modules) with war packaging. Maven generally builds everything into /target subdirectories of each module. So after mvn install look into target subdirectory in a module with war packaging.
Of course:
$ find . -iname "*.war"
works equally well ;-).
pom packaging is simply a specification that states the primary artifact is not a war or jar, but the pom.xml itself.
Often it is used in conjunction with "modules" which are typically contained in sub-directories of the project in question; however, it may also be used in certain scenarios where no primary binary was meant to be built, all the other important artifacts have been declared as secondary artifacts
Think of a "documentation" project, the primary artifact might be a PDF, but it's already built, and the work to declare it as a secondary artifact might be desired over the configuration to tell maven how to build a PDF that doesn't need compiled.
Packaging of pom is used in projects that aggregate other projects, and in projects whose only useful output is an attached artifact from some plugin. In your case, I'd guess that your top-level pom includes <modules>...</modules> to aggregate other directories, and the actual output is the result of one of the other (probably sub-) directories. It will, if coded sensibly for this purpose, have a packaging of war.
To simply answer your question when you do a mvn:install, maven will create a packaged artifact based on (packaging attribute in pom.xml), After you run your maven install you can find the file with .package extension
In target directory of the project workspace
Also where your maven 2 local repository is search for (.m2/respository) on your box, Your artifact is listed in .m2 repository under (groupId/artifactId/artifactId-version.packaging) directory
If you look under the directory you will find packaged extension file and also pom extension (pom extension is basically the pom.xml used to generate this package)
If your maven project is multi-module each module will two files as described above except for the top level project that will only have a pom
Packaging an artifact as POM means that it has a very simple lifecycle
package -> install -> deploy
http://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-the-lifecycle.html
This is useful if you are deploying a pom.xml file or a project that doesn't fit with the other packaging types.
We use pom packaging for many of our projects and bind extra phases and goals as appropriate.
For example some of our applications use:
prepare-package -> test -> package -> install -> deploy
When you mvn install the application it should add it to your locally .m2 repository. To publish elsewhere you will need to set up correct distribution management information. You may also need to use the maven builder helper plugin, if artifacts aren't automatically attached to by Maven.
I suggest to see the classic example at: http://maven.apache.org/guides/getting-started/index.html#How_do_I_build_more_than_one_project_at_once
Here my-webapp is web project, which depends on the code at my-app project. So to bundle two projects in one, we have top level pom.xml which mentions which are the projects (modules as per maven terminology) to be bundled finally. Such top level pom.xml can use pom packaging.
my-webapp can have war packaging and can have dependency on my-app. my-app can have jar packaging.
“pom” packaging is nothing but the container, which contains other packages/modules like jar, war, and ear.
if you perform any operation on outer package/container like mvn clean compile install. then inner packages/modules also get clean compile install.
no need to perform a separate operation for each package/module.
Real life use case
At a Java-heavy company we had a python project that needed to go into a Nexus artifact repository. Python doesn't really have binaries, so simply just wanted to .tar or .zip the python files and push. The repo already had maven integration, so we used <packaging>pom</packaging> designator with the maven assembly plugin to package the python project as a .zip and upload it.
The steps are outlined in this SO post
https://maven.apache.org/pom.html
The packaging type required to be pom for parent and aggregation (multi-module) projects. These types define the goals bound to a set of lifecycle stages. For example, if packaging is jar, then the package phase will execute the jar:jar goal. If the packaging is pom, the goal executed will be site:attach-descriptor
POM(Project Object Model) is nothing but the automation script for building the project,we can write the automation script in XML,
the building script files are named diffrenetly in different Automation tools
like we call build.xml in ANT,pom.xml in MAVEN
MAVEN can packages jars,wars, ears and POM which new thing to all of us
if you want check WHAT IS POM.XML
Our software is written in Java and comprise many (7) projects.
These projects are Netbeans ant projects.
I'm considering to converting them to maven2.
Where can I find some hints for doing such thing?
Don't read that book. It will only make you confused. Read this book instead: "Maven - The definitive guide" http://www.sonatype.com/books/maven-book/reference/ .
Also, the maven site has a lot of information, but the structure is terrible so you'll need to use google to navigate in it.
Here is my suggestion:
Do this by hand, not with "automagic" "help" from the IDE. Maven integration doesn't work that good yet, not in any IDE.
Make sure you program project is divided into modules under a common umbrella module, so that each module produces a single binary artifact (jar, war,...) possibly accompanied by the javadoc of the source code behind that artifact, a zip with the source code etc. The basic principle is that each module produces a single artifact, containing all the non-test-code under that module. You can do this while the project is still built by ant.
Each module should conform to the standard maven directory layout. The build destination is under [module]/target/[output-type, e.g. "classes"]. The source code is under [module]/src/main/[src-type e.g. "java"] and [module]/test/[src-type]. The artifact consists of all the code under src/main, and none of the code under src/test, as it built to the target directories. You can do this while the is still built by ant.
Start by transforming the sub-module that has no dependencies on other modules in the project.
Now you can create the parent maven module pom.xml with artifact type "pom", consisting of one of the modules below. Make a child module for the first submodule (the one with only external dependencies), using the umbrella module as "parent". Remember that you need to specify version for the parent. Remember to add the child module as a "module" in the parent too. Always use ${project.version} as version in the child modules when you create multi-module projects like this. All modules under a parent must be released simultaneously in a single operation, and if you use this setting maven will make sure the version fields stay the same across all modules and gets updated everywhere during the release. This may make it difficult to re-use the existing numbering scheme, but that doesn't matter. You are never going to run out of version numbers anyway.
Add the necessary dependencies, and make sure you can build the parent and the child module together using the command "mvn clean install" from the parent module.
Proceed with the rest of the modules the same way. Dependencies to other modules under the same parent project should also use ${project.version} as the "version" they are depending on, meaning "the same version as this". NOTE THAT in order to build, the module you are depending on must be built using "mvn install", so that it gets deployed to you local (computer) repository. Otherwise the depending module will not be able to find the classes. There are NO source-code dependencies between modules in maven, only dependencies to built and packed versions installed in local and remote repositories. This can be very confusing if you come from ant-projects. Build from the root module until you get comfortable with this. It takes two days.
Don't use maven integration in IDEs. It is a bad idea. Use "mvn idea:idea" or "mvn eclipse:eclipse" to set up your workspace as a non-maven ordinary IDE project. The inter-module dependencies mechanisms in maven and the IDE aren't identical and will never be. Also, if you have several mavenized projects with dependencies in between, you want to have several of these in your workspace with dependencies set up between. You can do this with mvn idea:idea / eclipse:eclipse if you create a separate maven project file called "workspace.xml" (or whatever) in the same directory as parent module, set up as a multi-module project containing modules "." and "../otherproject" (only one-way reference here, no parent ref back). If you run "mvn idea:idea / eclipse:eclipse -f workspace.xml" you get a workspace with all these modules linked together. No IDE integration lets you do that. This sound like a lot of extra work, but the workspace.xml-file is really small. It doesn't have to contain all that dependency stuff and all that, only the reference to the modules you want to bind together in your IDE.
I did a succeful migration of NetBeans Ant project to Maven project using the instruccions by Joseph Mocker here: http://forums.netbeans.org/ptopic55953.html
I cite the important part:
close the project
rename the build.xml, nbproject files/folders to something so NB won't recognize them.
close and restart NB (so any memory cache knowledge of the project is gone)
copy in an empty pom from some other project.
open the project back up in NB (NB should now identify it as a maven project)
rearrange the files to follow the maven way (™)
This won't be an easy task since Maven2 expects the files to be organized in a specific way. Anyway Better Builds with Maven is a free book that should get you started. It will help you understand Maven and it also has a chapter on migration.
I discovered that the migration is not necessary. The real requirements that I need was automatic download of dependencies (libraries).
This is also achieved by Ivy which nonetheless uses maven repositories.
I solved converting project from ant to ant+ivy with IvyBeans.
I have built a script to migrate Ant builds to Maven. You can find more information here:
https://github.com/ewhauser/ant2maven
It won't help you with fixing your directory structure and or any additional Ant tasks, but it removes a lot of the tedious steps to get started.