What is "pom" packaging in maven?

Question

pom is basically a container of submodules, each submodule is represented by a subdirectory in the same directory as pom.xml with pom packaging.

Somewhere, nested within the project structure you will find artifacts (modules) with war packaging. Maven generally builds everything into /target subdirectories of each module. So after mvn install look into target subdirectory in a module with war packaging.

Of course:

$ find . -iname "*.war"

works equally well ;-).

pom packaging is simply a specification that states the primary artifact is not a war or jar, but the pom.xml itself.

Often it is used in conjunction with "modules" which are typically contained in sub-directories of the project in question; however, it may also be used in certain scenarios where no primary binary was meant to be built, all the other important artifacts have been declared as secondary artifacts

Think of a "documentation" project, the primary artifact might be a PDF, but it's already built, and the work to declare it as a secondary artifact might be desired over the configuration to tell maven how to build a PDF that doesn't need compiled.

Packaging of pom is used in projects that aggregate other projects, and in projects whose only useful output is an attached artifact from some plugin. In your case, I'd guess that your top-level pom includes <modules>...</modules> to aggregate other directories, and the actual output is the result of one of the other (probably sub-) directories. It will, if coded sensibly for this purpose, have a packaging of war.

To simply answer your question when you do a mvn:install, maven will create a packaged artifact based on (packaging attribute in pom.xml), After you run your maven install you can find the file with .package extension

• In target directory of the project workspace
• Also where your maven 2 local repository is search for (.m2/respository) on your box, Your artifact is listed in .m2 repository under (groupId/artifactId/artifactId-version.packaging) directory
• If you look under the directory you will find packaged extension file and also pom extension (pom extension is basically the pom.xml used to generate this package)
• If your maven project is multi-module each module will two files as described above except for the top level project that will only have a pom

Packaging an artifact as POM means that it has a very simple lifecycle

package -> install -> deploy

http://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-the-lifecycle.html

This is useful if you are deploying a pom.xml file or a project that doesn't fit with the other packaging types.

We use pom packaging for many of our projects and bind extra phases and goals as appropriate.

For example some of our applications use:

prepare-package -> test -> package -> install -> deploy

When you mvn install the application it should add it to your locally .m2 repository. To publish elsewhere you will need to set up correct distribution management information. You may also need to use the maven builder helper plugin, if artifacts aren't automatically attached to by Maven.

I suggest to see the classic example at: http://maven.apache.org/guides/getting-started/index.html#How_do_I_build_more_than_one_project_at_once

Here my-webapp is web project, which depends on the code at my-app project. So to bundle two projects in one, we have top level pom.xml which mentions which are the projects (modules as per maven terminology) to be bundled finally. Such top level pom.xml can use pom packaging.

my-webapp can have war packaging and can have dependency on my-app. my-app can have jar packaging.

Real life use case

At a Java-heavy company we had a python project that needed to go into a Nexus artifact repository. Python doesn't really have binaries, so simply just wanted to .tar or .zip the python files and push. The repo already had maven integration, so we used <packaging>pom</packaging> designator with the maven assembly plugin to package the python project as a .zip and upload it.

The steps are outlined in this SO post