Maven

Apache Maven is a general-purpose build system that does not rely on Makefiles to build software. It is designed for building and managing and Java-based project.

Phases

The MavenBuilder and MavenPackage base classes come with the following phases:

build - compile code and package into a JAR file
install - copy to installation prefix

By default, these phases run:

$ mvn package
$ install . <prefix>

Important files

Maven packages can be identified by the presence of a pom.xml file. This file lists dependencies and other metadata about the project. There may also be configuration files in the .mvn directory.

Build system dependencies

Maven requires the mvn executable to build the project. It also requires Java at both build- and run-time. Because of this, the base class automatically adds the following dependencies:

depends_on("java", type=("build", "run"))
depends_on("maven", type="build")

In the pom.xml file, you may see sections like:

<requireJavaVersion>
   <version>[1.7,)</version>
</requireJavaVersion>
<requireMavenVersion>
   <version>[3.5.4,)</version>
</requireMavenVersion>

This specifies the versions of Java and Maven that are required to build the package. See https://docs.oracle.com/middleware/1212/core/MAVEN/maven_version.htm#MAVEN402 for a description of this version range syntax. In this case, you should add:

depends_on("java@7:", type="build")
depends_on("maven@3.5.4:", type="build")

Passing arguments to the build phase

The default build and install phases should be sufficient to install most packages. However, you may want to pass additional flags to the build phase. For example:

def build_args(self):
    return [
        "-Pdist,native",
        "-Dtar",
        "-Dmaven.javadoc.skip=true"
    ]

External documentation

For more information on the Maven build system, see: https://maven.apache.org/index.html