Set Up A Big Maven Project Quickly with Nested Archetypes

Summary

Creating a properly-nested maven project is easy once you know that the archetype builder recognizes parent POMs and creates child modules linked automatically to the parent.

Motivation

Starting a large new maven project has historically been a fair amount of work. Sometimes I copy from an existing multi-module project, doing lots of renaming in the POM files by hand. Other times I'll start from scratch, carefully checking the child POMs reference the parent properly. However, there's a better way

Nested Archetypes

First, create your parent module and its POM. Start in the folder holding your other projects, and run this command to create a starter parent POM:

mvn archetype:generate \
-DarchetypeGroupId=org.codehaus.mojo.archetypes \
-DarchetypeArtifactId=pom-root \
-DarchetypeVersion=RELEASE

Second, go into the newly created folder, and use your archetypes of choice to create the child modules. For a Full Stack Java project, you'll want modules like these:

ui-web: The Flavour Java SPA front-end
resource: The JAX-RS service implementation
api: The JAX-RS service definition / interface
db: The database access layer
model: The POJOs
logic: Shared logic

For each, find the appropriate maven archetype, and run a command like the following, substituting the right coordinates. This example is for the Flavour module:

mvn archetype:generate \
  -DarchetypeGroupId=com.frequal.flavour \
  -DarchetypeArtifactId=teavm-flavour-application \
  -DarchetypeVersion=0.3.0

And for the model and other JAR-style modules:

mvn archetype:generate \
  -DarchetypeGroupId=org.apache.maven.archetypes \
  -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-quickstart \
  -DarchetypeVersion=RELEASE

References

StackOverflow post on creating empty projects

Last modified on 4 Jul 2024 by AO