Below are the different goals and configurations of the Help plugin.
The active-profiles mojo is used to discover which profiles have been applied to the projects currently being built. For each project in the build session, it will output a list of profiles which have been applied to that project, along with the source of the profile (POM, settings.xml or profiles.xml).
You can execute this mojo using the following command:
mvn help:active-profiles
The describe mojo is used to discover information about Maven plugins. Given either a plugin or a groupId, an artifactId and optionally a version, the mojo will lookup that plugin and output details about it. If the user also specifies which mojo to describe, the describe mojo will limit output to the details of that mojo, including parameters.
This mojo requires either the groupId and artifactId parameters or the plugin parameter to be specified:
mvn help:describe -DgroupId=org.somewhere -DartifactId=some-plugin -Dversion=0.0.0
or
mvn help:describe -Dplugin=org.somewhere:some-plugin:0.0.0
Here is an example with the mojo parameter specified:
mvn help:describe -Dplugin=org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-help-plugin -Dmojo=describe
Note: version is always optional here.
The effective-pom mojo is used to make visible the POM that results from the application of interpolation, inheritance and active profiles. It provides a useful way of removing the guesswork about just what ends up in the POM that Maven uses to build your project. It will iterate over all projects in the current build session, printing the effective POM for each.
The mojo can be executed using the following command:
mvn help:effective-pom
The effective-settings mojo is used to view the settings that Maven actually uses to run the build. These settings are a result of merging the global file with the user's file, with the user's file taking precedence.
The mojo can be executed using the following command:
mvn help:effective-settings
All the mojos listed above can use the optional output parameter to divert the output to a file. Here is an example of that:
mvn help:active-profiles -Doutput=/path/to/file
