During JAlba 2019 I had again met and talked with Maven project chairman Robert Scholte. I’ve taken an opportunity to ask him: what are the most common errors you encounter in people’s Maven projects?
That’s easy – he said – `mvn clean install`
Robert Scholte at JAlba 2019
So we talked some more and it boils down to:
- using
cleanall the time is needless. Clean was needed in Maven 2 era. Why? Cause there were plug-ins which didn’t clean their results up so you could wind up with a result from a previous build showing things no longer true (worse) or interfering with creating a new result (bad, but better, you at least know immediately something’s wrong). Nowadays plug-ins are cleaning up rather well (though there may be exceptions). - and most of the time you don’t want to
installyou just want toverify– run all the tests, checks, make sure it builds. Install unnecessarily adds theinstallphase (and related IO) and its plug-ins – lengthening the build process and your feedback loop and rewriting disk files without need.
So, mvn verify people, or mvn test even if you’re not into integration tests.
