Maven: The Complete Reference
   - 12.4. Publishing Archetypes

12.4. Publishing Archetypes

Once you’ve generated a good set of archetypes, you will probably want to share them with the world. To do this, you’ll need to create something called an Archetype catalog. An Archetype catalog is an XML file which the Maven Archetype plugin can consult to locate archetypes in a repository. Archetype Catalog for the Apache Cocoon Project shows the contents of the Archetype catalog for the Apache Cocoon project which can be found at http://cocoon.apache.org/archetype-catalog.xml.

Archetype Catalog for the Apache Cocoon Project. 

<archetype-catalog>
    <archetypes>
        <archetype>
            <groupId>org.apache.cocoon</groupId>
            <artifactId>cocoon-22-archetype-block-plain</artifactId>
            <version>1.0.0</version>
            <description>Creates an empty Cocoon block; useful if you want to add
                another block to a Cocoon application</description>

        </archetype>
        <archetype>
            <groupId>org.apache.cocoon</groupId>
            <artifactId>cocoon-22-archetype-block</artifactId>
            <version>1.0.0</version>
            <description>Creates a Cocoon block containing some small
                samples</description>
        </archetype>

        <archetype>
            <groupId>org.apache.cocoon</groupId>
            <artifactId>cocoon-22-archetype-webapp</artifactId>
            <version>1.0.0</version>
            <description>Creates a web application configured to host Cocoon blocks.
                Just add the block dependencies</description>
        </archetype>
    </archetypes>

</archetype-catalog>

To generate such a catalog, you’ll need to crawl a Maven repository and generate this catalog XML file. The Archetype plugin has a goal named crawl which does just this, and it assumes that it has access to the file system that hosts a repository. If you run archetype:crawl from the command line with no arguments, the Archetype plugin will crawl your local repository searching for Archetypes and it will create an archetype-catalog.xml in ~/.m2/repository.

[tobrien@MACBOOK repository]$ mvn archetype:crawl
[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[INFO] Searching repository for plugin with prefix: 'archetype'.
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Building Maven Default Project
[INFO]task-segment: [archetype:crawl] (aggregator-style)
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] [archetype:crawl]
repository /Users/tobrien/.m2/repository
catalogFile null
[INFO] Scanning /Users/tobrien/.m2/repository/ant/ant/1.5/ant-1.5.jar
[INFO] Scanning /Users/tobrien/.m2/repository/ant/ant/1.5.1/ant-1.5.1.jar
[INFO] Scanning /Users/tobrien/.m2/repository/ant/ant/1.6/ant-1.6.jar
[INFO] Scanning /Users/tobrien/.m2/repository/ant/ant/1.6.5/ant-1.6.5.jar
...
[INFO] Scanning /Users/tobrien/.m2/repository/xom/xom/1.0/xom-1.0.jar
[INFO] Scanning /Users/tobrien/.m2/repository/xom/xom/1.0b3/xom-1.0b3.jar
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESSFUL
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 31 seconds
[INFO] Finished at: Sun Oct 12 16:06:07 CDT 2008
[INFO] Final Memory: 6M/12M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you are interested in creating an Archetype catalog it is usually because you are an open source project or organization which has a set of archetypes to share. These archetypes are likely already available in a repository, and you need to crawl this repository and generate a catalog in a file system. In other words, you’ll probably want to scan a directory on an existing Maven repository and generate an Archetype plugin at the root of the repository. To do this, you’ll need to pass in the catalog and repository parameters to the archetype:crawl goal.

The following command line assumes that you are trying to generate a catalog file in /var/www/html/archetype-catalog.xml for a repository hosted in /var/www/html/maven2.

$ mvn archetype:crawl -Dcatalog=/var/www/html/archetype-catalog.xml \
[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[INFO] Searching repository for plugin with prefix: 'archetype'.
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Building Maven Default Project
[INFO]task-segment: [archetype:crawl] (aggregator-style)
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] [archetype:crawl]
repository /Users/tobrien/tmp/maven2
catalogFile /Users/tobrien/tmp/blah.xml
-Drepository=/var/www/html/maven2
...











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