Does IntelliJ Build > Rebuild Project invoke maven?

Question

In IntelliJ 14.1 what exactly happens when Build > Rebuild Project is invoked for a maven project.

• Does it call mvn compile?
• Does it do something independent of maven?

I have tried to testing this and when I click Build > Rebuild Project I can't see any console output indicating that maven is running, if I run maven from the maven projects view I get maven output.

So what exactly is the relationship between IntelliJ Build > Rebuild Project and build tools such as maven / gradle / ant?

Answer 1

No, the IntelliJ IDEA make does not invoke Maven. When you open a Maven or Gradle project, it reads the settings of the project and stores them as part of its internal project model. When you invoke Build, it uses the imported settings to compile your project using its own build system. Rebuild Project keeps the existing imported settings, deletes all .class files and IntelliJ's incremental compilation caches, and performs a full build of the project using IntelliJ IDEA's build system.

The advantage of doing that is that the IntelliJ IDEA build system supports very fine-grained incremental rebuilds (for example, if you change the signature of the method, it will recompile only those classes which actually call the method, and not any other code).

Note that you can configure IntelliJ IDEA to run an Ant task or a Maven goal either before or after the main project compilation, so if your build is doing something non-standard, you can still use it with the IntelliJ IDEA build system.