Is there a way to post-process project generated from archetype?

Question

Say I have an archetype and I generate a project from it. But I would like to resolve placeholders in a property file of the project I generated on after generation time by passing the value for placeholder through command line.

For example having the following command line:

mvn archetype:create -DarchetypeGroupId=... -DarchetypeArtifactId=... -DarchetypeVersion=1.0 -DgroupId=... -DartifactId=my-project -Dversion=1.0-SNAPSHOT -Dhello=Hello!

say the archetype contains app.properties (as part of project which is being generated) with the following content:

greeting=${hello}

Is it possible to replace ${hello} with "Hello!" right after project has been generated as a result of mvn archetype:create command?

Answer 1

Yes this is possible. From the advanced usage guide for maven archetypes:

If the user wants to customize the generated project even further, a groovy script named archetype-post-generate.groovy can be added in src/main/resources/META-INF/. This script will end up in the generated archetype's META-INF folder and will be executed upon creating a project from this archetype. This groovy script has access to the ArchetypeGenerationRequest object, as well as all the System.getProperties() and all the archetype generation properties the user has specified.