Custom Maven Assembly Descriptors

External

• Custom assembly descriptor reference http://maven.apache.org/components/plugins/maven-assembly-plugin/assembly.html

Internal

• Maven assembly Plugin

Overview

Aside from pre-defined assembly descriptors, Maven allows creation of custom assembly descriptors. Custom assembly descriptors are conventionally placed under src/assembly of the module that executes the plugin.

Assembly Descriptors and System Properties

Maven resolves system properties referred from values specified in the assembly descriptors. This helps with enforcing the pattern where module versions are specified in only one place - the parent project pom.xml. For more details, see "Multi-module maven projects versioning" section.

Example

This is an example of a custom assembly descriptor, used to build a complex release artifact for a multi-module project:

https://github.com/NovaOrdis/events/blob/master/release/src/assembly/release.xml

Elements

<id>

The <id> element in the assembly descriptor specifies the value of the assembly ID. The presence of the <id> element in the assembly descriptor is mandatory, if it is not specified, Maven will generate a parsing error. The assembly ID will become the assembly artifact classifier, present between the version and the extension. For more details on assembly artifact naming rules, see "The Name of the Assembly Artifact" section.

<format>

<formats>
    <format>zip</format>
</formats>

Multiple formats can be provided, and the plugin will generate an archive for each of them.