CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javamavenconfiguration
Sam Goldberg
Sam Goldberg

Reputation: 6801

Maven: is there simple way to generate a pom.xml file only?

I wanted to take a legacy project, and generate an initial pom.xml file for it, without converting the whole project. (The thinking is to take advantage of some Maven tasks without creating a big ripple effect in the automated builds that already include this project, which are not Maven projects.)

Is there some way to do this other than archetype:generate (in a phony directory), and then copying the pom.xml to where I really want it?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 3117

Answers (2)

Vidya
Vidya

Reputation: 30310

You seem to want to do an unorthodox thing with Maven, and while I like Maven, I find Maven is absolutely terrible at doing unorthodox things.

I would suggest using Gradle instead--especially since you just need to perform one task and don't need to build with it (and therefore learn it).

Because Gradle is a Groovy DSL, you can simply write some Groovy code to access a repository and copy it into a directory on the local file system.

(I will leave aside my personal abhorrence of putting compiled artifacts into source control.)

Gradle also has outstanding integration with Ant.

Upvotes: 1

Stephen C
Stephen C

Reputation: 718798

AFAIK, no.

But if you know enough about Maven, you can typically write a POM file for a legacy project.

The complication is that the files / directories of a legacy project will typically not be organized in the Maven recommended way, so the normal generation tools won't work. However, "it is said" that Maven can cope with non-standard organisations ... if you write the POM file appropriately.

Another approach is to build the legacy project in the legacy way, and then manually add the resulting JAR files to your Maven repo with appropriate "coordinates" (i.e. group-id, artifact-id and version) so that your Maven projects can use them.

Upvotes: 1

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