Maven: create directory structure from pom.xml

Question

I have Maven a pom.xml file (copied from another project, and adapted), and I would like to generate the directory structure for a new project. Which command can do this?

Note that I found countless examples on the web, that explained how to use mvn archetype:create to create a pom.xml file and the directory structure, but I already have a pom.xml, and I would like to create the directories based on that, without specifying groupId, artifactId etc on the command line.

mvn archetype:create-from-project also seems to create a pom.xml based on another pom.xml (?) but I just want the directories. Thank you in advance!

EDIT: I am aware that this is not a "big problem" because I can create the directories manually :) I did it already many times, and I always felt that there must be a smarter way to do it...

Answer 1

I agree that there should be a way to specify that maven itself should look at my pom and generate a project/dir structure from that. I don't know of a way to do that, but here's what I do:

Step 1: move your already created pom.xml somewhere else (maven will complain if you already have it in the directory where you will run the next command)

Step 2: from the command line, in your new maven project directory execute:

mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-quickstart -DinteractiveMode=false -DgroupId=my.package.path -DartifactId=myartifact 

You do have to edit groupId and artifactId to match your pom (sigh), but this creates the basic directory structure for you and a default Java class and Unit test.

Step 3: move/copy your pom.xml into that project directory

Step 4: run some maven command like mvn clean package or mvn dependency:tree to start downloading dependencies

Note: I'm including this answer because some of the previous answers recommend using mvn archetype:create, but according to the maven website that goal is deprecated in favor of using generate. And I wanted to show how to do it independent of any IDE or IDE plugins.

Answer 2

Not to sound condescending, but:

mkdir -p src/main/java mkdir -p src/main/resources mkdir -p src/test/java mkdir -p src/test/resources 

(or feel free to substitute different directories).

I don't know of any maven command that will create this structure for you without creating a new pom file.