How to get Maven groupId, artifactId & project version to the command line

Question

I would like to retrieve from the command line the groupId, the artifactId & the version of a Maven project.

The proposed solution in this topic "How to get Maven project version to the bash command line" is to use the following plugin:

mvn org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-help-plugin:2.2:evaluate -Dexpression=project.artifactId

It works well but I can't figure out how to set, at the same time, the project.groupId, project.artifactId & project.version to the -Dexpression argument.

I would avoid launching 3 times the Maven command with a different -Dexpression argument each time...

Thks

---

For the moment, I retrieve data by doing the following:

local pom_groupid=`mvn org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-help-plugin:2.2:evaluate -Dexpression=project.groupId |grep -Ev '(^\[|Download\w+:)'`
local pom_artifactid=`mvn org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-help-plugin:2.2:evaluate -Dexpression=project.artifactId |grep -Ev '(^\[|Download\w+:)'`
local pom_version=`mvn org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-help-plugin:2.2:evaluate -Dexpression=project.version |grep -Ev '(^\[|Download\w+:)'`

Answer 1

Here's another approach that doesn't require creating a Maven plugin even though Olivier has shown that it is pretty easy to make one.

mvn -q -Dexec.executable=echo -Dexec.args='${project.groupId} ${project.artifactId} ${project.version}' --non-recursive exec:exec 2>/dev/null

Note that this is tailored to the linux environment. On windows you could probably create a batch file that prints its input or something.

One drawback of this approach is that you may have to add | grep -v "something" to the very end of the command above (after the 2>/dev/null) to filter out some text that maven prints to stdout. In my case I only had one line of text to filter that'll only appear at my company.

Credit where it is due: I adapted this info from this other StackOverflow thread.

Answer 2

This is the cleanest solution available:

mvn org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-help-plugin:3.2.0:evaluate \
-Dexpression=project.groupId -q -DforceStdout

mvn org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-help-plugin:3.2.0:evaluate \
-Dexpression=project.artifactId -q -DforceStdout

mvn org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-help-plugin:3.2.0:evaluate \
-Dexpression=project.version -q -DforceStdout

Advantages:

• This works fine on all operating systems (OS X, Ubuntu, Windows etc.) and on all shells (bash, zsh etc.)
• [very important] This works fine even if groupId or version is inherited from parent pom.xml.
  • Note that xmllint-based solutions fail when POM properties are inherited!
• Zero dependency on external tools! (notice that I'm not using any echo or grep)

Alternatively, you can add this entry in your pom.xml, under plugins section:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-help-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>3.2.0</version>
</plugin>

and then run commands compactly as follows:

mvn help:evaluate -Dexpression=project.groupId -q -DforceStdout
mvn help:evaluate -Dexpression=project.artifactId -q -DforceStdout
mvn help:evaluate -Dexpression=project.version -q -DforceStdout

Please note:

• maven-help-plugin version 3.2.0 (and above) has forceStdout option. You may replace 3.2.0 in above command with a newer version from the list of available versions of mvn-help-plugin from artifactory, if available.
• Option -q suppresses verbose messages.