How to control VM arguments for maven-jetty-plugin?

Question

How to set VM arguments for Jetty run from maven-jetty-plugin?

For example, I need to pass -Xmx arguments to Jetty run by the mvn jetty:run command.

Answer 1

The enviroment variable MAVEN_OPTS is the answer. The string content of MAVEN_OPTS is passed to JVM (java.exe).

• Linux: in shell type export MAVEN_OPTS=....
• Windows: in shell (cmd.exe) type set MAVEN_OPTS=...

For example: on Windows set MAVEN_OPTS="-Xmx1024m" sets the heap size of the Maven process to 1024mb.

Update (01.04.2013): Pass it directly to Jetty.

Matthew Farwell (please upvote his answer to give him credit) comes with the solution of using a forked JVM process to run Jetty which is a new feature of the Jetty plugin. This is a better solution as the former runs inside same JVM process as Maven (thus shares memory).