How to create maven archetype and a Catalog for project automatic generation

As many that are using maven 2 since years, I have many mavenized projects and the most of them have similar structure: are web projects, uses jetty and other plugins, many shares a lot of dependencies. So I decided to create an archetype to quickly generate new projects. I also wanted to use the mvn archetype generate command, so I prepared a archetypes catalog in my repository to allow me to use my personal archetypes with automatic generation.

As a start, I took an existing mvn archetype source code. Yes, maybe there are a good tutorial but what is better than an existing simple projects to modify? I am the lazy dev after all. I choose wicketrad-archetype, for the only reason I already had the code on my computer.

There are just two things to do:

1. Change group and artifact id in the archetype pom (the one in the root folder) with what you like i called mines net.ildella.archetypes.base and net.ildella.archetypes.pheadra.
2. Modify the pom.xml in src/main/resources/archetype-resources. This will be the one that will be used as basis for generated projects. Put in there whatever you like: plugins with configurations, dependencies, some comment as tip or reminder should also be useful.

Then a simple "mvn install" will install archetype artifact in local repository.

Let's now go for the Catalogue: create a file called archetype-catalog.xml with a content like this one:

<pre>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<archetype-catalog>
   <archetypes>
<archetype>
           <groupId>net.ildella.archetypes</groupId>
           <artifactId>base</artifactId>
           <version>1.0</version>
           <repository>http://www.mvnsearch.org/maven2</repository>
           <description>Basic maven projects with useful stuff configured</description>
       </archetype>
<archetype>
           <groupId>net.ildella.archetypes</groupId>
           <artifactId>phaedra</artifactId>
           <version>1.0</version>
           <repository>http://www.mvnsearch.org/maven2</repository>
           <description>Basic + pheadra dependencies and stuff</description>
       </archetype>
   </archetypes>
</archetype-catalog>
</pre>

and put it in your ~/.m2/repository folder, or wherever you keep your repository.
That's all. Now we can do:

<pre>
mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeCatalog=file:///home/ildella/.m2/repository/
</pre>

to get the following result:

we choose a number and we got our skeleton project.

If like me you started from wicketrad-archetype, have a look at file src/main/resources/META-INF/maven/archetype.xml to see how to include resources to your skeleton project, for example to add some demonstration classes.

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