The Maven Wrapper is an easy way to ensure a user of your Maven build has everything necessary to run your Maven build.
Why might this be necessary? Maven to date has been very stable for users, is available on most systems or is easy to procure: but with many of the recent changes in Maven it will be easier for users to have a fully encapsulated build setup provided by the project. With the Maven Wrapper, this is very easy to do and it’s a great idea borrowed from Gradle.
The easiest way to setup the Maven Wrapper for your project is to use the Maven Wrapper Plugin with its provided wrapper goal. To add or update all the necessary Maven Wrapper files to your project execute the following command:
mvn wrapper:wrapper
Normally you instruct users to install a specific version of Apache Maven, put it on the PATH and then run the mvn command like the following:
mvn clean install
But now, with a Maven Wrapper setup, you can instruct users to run wrapper scripts:
./mvnw clean install
or on Windows
mvnw.cmd clean install
A normal Maven build will be executed, with the one important change that if the user doesn’t have the necessary version of Maven specified in .mvn/wrapper/maven-wrapper.properties it will be downloaded for the user first, installed and then used.
Subsequent uses of mvnw/mvnw.cmd use the previously downloaded, specific version as needed.
The wrapper should work on various operating systems including
For all those *nix operating systems, various shells should work including
In terms of Apache Maven versions itself, the wrapper should work with any Maven 3.x version and it defaults to the release used when setting up the wrapper. We do NOT plan to support the deprecated, EOL’ed Maven 2.x.
The maven-wrapper.jar (to download and install target Maven version required by mvnw) and the Maven Wrapper Plugin (to inject Wrapper into a project) use Java 7.
The wrapper supports a verbose mode in which it outputs further information. It is activated by setting the MVNW_VERBOSE environment variable to true.
By default it is off.
By default, the Maven Wrapper JAR archive is added to the using project as small binary file .mvn/wrapper/maven-wrapper.jar. It is used to bootstrap the download and invocation of Maven from the wrapper shell scripts.
If your project is not allowed to contain binary files like this, you can configure your version control system to exclude checkin/commit of the wrapper jar.
If the JAR is not found to be available by the scripts they will attempt to download the file from the URL specified in .mvn/wrapper/maven-wrapper.properties under wrapperUrl and put it in place. The download is attempted via curl, wget and, as last resort, by compiling the ./mvn/wrapper/MavenWrapperDownloader.java file and executing the resulting class.
If your Maven repository is password protected you can specify your username via the environment variable MVNW_USERNAME and the password via the environment variable MVNW_PASSWORD.
To switch the version of Maven used to build a project, you can initialize it using:
mvn wrapper:wrapper -Dmaven=3.5.4
which works for any version except snapshots. Once you have a wrapper you can change its version by setting the distributionUrl in .mvn/wrapper/maven-wrapper.properties, e.g.
distributionUrl=https://repo.maven.apache.org/maven2/org/apache/maven/apache-maven/3.5.4/apache-maven-3.5.4-bin.zip
To download Maven from a location that requires Basic Authentication you have 2 options:
Set the environment variables MVNW_USERNAME and MVNW_PASSWORD
or
add user and password to the distributionUrl like that: distributionUrl=https://username:password@<yourserver>/maven2/org/apache/maven/apache-maven/3.2.1/apache-maven-3.2.1-bin.zip
This is a feature of Maven itself and the wrapper just happens to take it into account. Simply set MAVEN_USER_HOME to the desired path and the wrapper uses it as the base of the Maven distro installation.
See https://www.lewuathe.com/maven-wrapper-home.html and https://github.com/takari/maven-wrapper/issues/17
When using an internal Maven repository manager, you have two options:
If MVNW_REPOURL is set during the wrapper installation with the maven-wrapper-plugin, the URL is used in the maven-wrapper.properties file.
If not set, but your mirror URL in your settings.xml is configured, it will be used.
Maven Wrapper is composed of 3 pieces:
maven-wrapper, providing the maven-wrapper.jar that downloads, installs and runs target Maven distribution,
maven-wrapper-distribution, that provides mvnw/mvnw.cmd scripts distributions,
maven-wrapper-plugin, the wrapper plugin to ease installing Wrapper into a project.