when to use <build> plugin in maven pom.xml?

Question

In our project, we have configured jetty inside build plugin in pom, i want to understand configuration settings in pom/ what and all we can configure in pom.

what is <build><plugin> section in pom, when to use.

difficult to understand from tutorials because lot of different examples which is making confuse.

Please can somebody explain for the above in detail?

Answer 1

Plugins defined in your buildsection plugins tag will be executed during the build of your project.

There are many plugins that do something with your build. For example the maven-compiler-plugin which allows you to set the Java version for your project.

 <build>
   <plugins>
    <plugin>
      <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
      <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
      <version>3.6.1</version>
      <configuration>
        <source>1.8</source>
        <target>1.8</target>
      </configuration>
    </plugin>
   </plugins>
  </build>

a list of maven build plugins supported by maven itself