Maven: The Complete Reference
10.2. Building a Project Site with Maven
To illustrate the process of building a project website, create a sample Maven project with the archetype plugin:
$ mvn archetype:create -DgroupId=org.sonatype.mavenbook -DartifactId=sample-project
This creates the simplest possible Maven project with one Java class
in src/main/java and a simple POM. You can then build a Maven site
by simply running mvn site. To build the site and preview the result
in a browser, you can run mvn site:run, this will build the site and
start an embedded instance of Jetty.
$ cd sample-project $ mvn site:run [INFO] Scanning for projects... [INFO] Searching repository for plugin with prefix: 'site'. [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [INFO] Building sample-project [INFO]task-segment: [site:run] (aggregator-style) [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [INFO] Setting property: classpath.resource.loader.class => 'org.codehaus.plexus.velocity.ContextClassLoaderResourceLoader'. [INFO] Setting property: velocimacro.messages.on => 'false'. [INFO] Setting property: resource.loader => 'classpath'. [INFO] Setting property: resource.manager.logwhenfound => 'false'. [INFO] [site:run] 2008-04-26 11:52:26.981::INFO: Logging to STDERR via org.mortbay.log.StdErrLog [INFO] Starting Jetty on http://localhost:8080/ 2008-04-26 11:52:26.046::INFO: jetty-6.1.5 2008-04-26 11:52:26.156::INFO: NO JSP Support for /, did not find org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServlet 2008-04-26 11:52:26.244::INFO: Started SelectChannelConnector@0.0.0.0:8080
Once Jetty starts and is listening to port 8080, you can see the project’s site when you go to http://localhost:8080/ in a web browser. You can see the results in Figure 10.1, “Simple Generated Maven Site”.
If you click around on this simple site, you’ll see that it isn’t very
helpful as a real project site. There’s just nothing there (and it
doesn’t look very good). Since the sample-project hasn’t configured
any developers, mailing lists, issue tracking providers, or source
code repositories, all of these pages on the project site will have no
information. Even the index page of the site states, "There is
currently no description associated with this project". To customize
the site, you’ll have to start to add content to the project and to
the project’s POM.
If you are going to use the Maven Site plugin to build your project’s site, you’ll want to customize it. You will want to populate some of the important fields in the POM that tell Maven about the people participating in the project, and you’ll want to customize the left-hand navigation menu and the links visible in the header of the page. To customize the contents of the site and affect the contents of the left-hand navigation menu, you will need to edit the site descriptor.