Goals

Learning Goals

• Explain goals in Maven.
• Examine goals of a specific plugin.

What are Goals?

As discussed earlier, plugins are used to extend Maven’s core functionality. Each plugin consists of goals. A goal is an action taken on the project as defined by the POM file.

Examining Plugin Goals

We can find out the goals in a specific plugin using the following command:

mvn help:describe -Dplugin=org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-compiler-plugin

Here’s the output:

Name: Apache Maven Compiler Plugin
Description: The Compiler Plugin is used to compile the sources of your
  project.
Group Id: org.apache.maven.plugins
Artifact Id: maven-compiler-plugin
Version: 3.10.1
Goal Prefix: compiler

This plugin has 3 goals:

compiler:compile
  Description: Compiles application sources

compiler:help
  Description: Display help information on maven-compiler-plugin.
    Call mvn compiler:help -Ddetail=true -Dgoal=<goal-name> to display
    parameter details.

compiler:testCompile
  Description: Compiles application test sources.

For more information, run 'mvn help:describe [...] -Ddetail'

The command runs the describe goal of the help plugin specified as help:describe. The -Dplugin argument specifies the plugin we want to examine.

We can also use the help goal in most Maven plugins (documentation).

Conclusion

We have learned that goals are specific tasks of a plugin and how to examine what goals are available in a plugin.