Maven Plugin Plugin
The Maven Plugin Plugin is used to create a Maven plugin descriptor for any Mojo's found in the source tree, to include in the JAR. It is also used to generate report files for the Mojos as well as the artifact metadata and generating a generic help goal.
Goals Overview
The Plugin Plugin has four goals:
- plugin:descriptor generates a plugin descriptor,
- plugin:addPluginArtifactMetadata injects any plugin-specific artifact metadata to the project's artifact, for subsequent installation and deployment,
- plugin:helpmojo generates a help mojo which describes all mojos in a plugin,
- plugin:help display help information on maven-plugin-plugin.
Usage
General instructions on how to use the Plugin Plugin can be found on the usage page. Some more specific use cases are described in the examples given below. Last but not least, users occasionally contribute additional examples, tips or errata to the Plugin Developers Centre page.
In case you still have questions regarding the plugin's usage feel free to contact the user mailing list. The posts to the mailing list are archived and could already contain the answer to your question as part of an older thread. Hence, it is also worth browsing/searching the mail archive.
If you feel like the plugin is missing a feature or has a defect, you can fill a feature request or bug report in our issue tracker. When creating a new issue, please provide a comprehensive description of your concern. Especially for fixing bugs it is crucial that the developers can reproduce your problem. For this reason, entire debug logs, POMs or most preferably little demo projects attached to the issue are very much appreciated. Of course, patches are welcome, too. Contributors can check out the project from our source repository and will find supplementary information in the guide to helping with Maven.
Examples
The following examples shows how to use the Plugin Plugin in more advanced usecases: