CODEWITHSUNDEEP
maven
DaeYoung
DaeYoung

Reputation: 1229

What does maven clean install -U do?

I have eclipse ide with m2e plugin, maven and weblogc app server running from my local box.

I have imported someone else's multiple maven projects from bitbucket to my box. I was told that one of them is main and rest are dependencies in which I never seen anything like that before. I have always dealt with single maven project. Anyhow from the instruction, it says I have to run maven command such as "clean install -U".

In the IDE so I touched run configuration for each mvn project by setting goal as "clean install -U". By reading maven guide, I kind understand what each term means but when you combine together with a passing parameter, what does it do actually? I didn't expect a jar (web app) to be deployed to an application server but it did also.

Upvotes: 6

Views: 24812

Answers (1)

Jim Weaver
Jim Weaver

Reputation: 1043

-U forces maven to check any external dependencies (third party dependencies) that might need to be updated based on your POM files.

clean install are both basic maven lifecycle phases (https://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-the-lifecycle.html).

install normally would simply take the artifact that is built and put it in the local repository, i.e. a directory on the box you are building on (.m2 directory most of the time). It would not do a deployment to a server - typically the deploy phase would be used to do that.

However, developers can override and add to what maven does in the various phases, so just like in the days of ant things can easily devolve into chaos no one can understand on complex projects ;-).

sometimes in the integration-test phase, developers will tell maven to start up a container temporarily to run the web app on, so that tests can be run against it, and then that container is shut down when the integration-test phase completes.

Upvotes: 10

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