How to Create a Custom Maven Archetype

In this article, I will show you how to create your own Archetype in Maven so it can fit your company coding structure template. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Create a Maven project using Eclipse to be used as your custom archetype.
2. I named it customArchitype.
3. Its pom.xml looks like:

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
    <groupId>com.example</groupId>
    <artifactId>customArchitype</artifactId>
    <version>1.0.Example</version>
</project>

4. Then create a folder structure like META-INF/maven under src/main/resources.
5. Now, your project structure should look like: src/main/resources/META-INF/maven
6. After that, create a file called archetype.xml under the aforesaid folder. This file will look like the following:

<archetype xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-archetype-plugin/archetype/1.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-archetype-plugin/archetype/1.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/archetype-1.0.0.xsd">
    <id>customArchitype</id>
    <sources>
        <source>src/main/java/customArchitype/CustomExample.java</source>
    </sources>
    <testSources>
        <source>src/test/java/customArchitype/CustomExampleTest.java</source>
    </testSources>
</archetype>

This archetype.xml is the most important part, which tells us about the project structure it creates. So here, you can customize the project structure to fit into your organization.

CustomExample.java file:

package ${groupId}.customArchitype;


public class CustomExample {
    public void printName(String name) {
        System.out.println("Hello" + name);
    }
}

CustomExampleTest.java file:

package ${groupId}.customArchitype;


public class CustomExampleTest {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        CustomExample example = new CustomExample();
        example.printName("Shamik");
    }
}

Placeholder

Please note that in the package statement I wrote package ${groupId}.customArchitype;  because when we give the group Id in our archetype.generate command, our sample project creates that package and places the files under that, so I want to dynamically replace the package value. Hence I wrote a placeholder, ${groupId}, which actually replaces the value of the group id, which we will pass when invoking the archetype:generate command.

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
    <groupId>${groupId}</groupId>
    <artifactId>${artifactId}</artifactId>
    <version>${version}</version>
    <packaging>jar</packaging>
    <name>Custom Archetype</name>
    <url>http://javaonfly.blogspot.in/</url>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>junit</groupId>
            <artifactId>junit</artifactId>
            <version>3.8.1</version>
            <scope>test</scope>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
</project>

Please note that in the groupId and artifactId tag, I used the placeholder for the same reason stated above. But this is an important thing to do, unless the generated POM will not replace the group id and artifact id given in the archetype: generate command.

Overall Structure

Test

mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeGroupId=com.example -DarchetypeArtifactId=customArchitype
    -DarchetypeVersion=1.0.Example -DgroupId=com.example -DartifactId=newArchitype  

It will create a new project called newArchitype.

Here's a generic version of this command:

mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeGroupId=<custom-archetype group id>
    -DarchetypeArtifactId=<custom-archetype artifactid>
    -DarchetypeVersion=<custom-archetype version>
    -DgroupId=<new project Group Id>
    -DartifactId=<new project artifact Id>