Although Maven offers a “convention over configuration” solution, there is still more then enough configuration necessary to cause some serious headache. In this post I will share some best practices with you that will ease maintenance of your POM files.
- Don’t use deprecated references like ${artifactId} or ${pom.artifactId}. Use the new ${project.artifactId} syntax. Note that this syntax follows the XML document structure, which makes it easy to remember and predict the value that the reference will result in.
- Try to avoid using inherited properties. Developers can easily forget that a certain property is used by a child POM and change the value breaking the build in an unexpected place. Secondly, its quite annoying not to be able to easily lookup a property without having to find and examine the parent POM.
- Use the dependencymanagement section of the parent pom to define all dependency versions, but do not set a scope here so that all dependencies have scope compile by default.
- Use properties to define the dependency versions. This way you can get an overview of all versions being used without having to scroll through multiple pages of dependency sections.
- Use the pluginmanagement section of the parent pom to define versions for *all* plugins that your build uses, even standard maven plugins like maven-compile-plugin and maven-source-plugin. This way your build will not suddenly behave differently when a new version of a plugin is released.
- When using a parent POM that is not located in the directory directly above the current POM define an empty relativePath element in your parent section.
- Use the dependency plugin to check your project for both unnecessary dependencies and undeclared-but-used-none-the-less dependencies. The goal is called ‘analyze’, so run the following command on the console: “mvn dependency:analyze”
- Make sure the pom files contain all the repository references needed to download all dependencies. If you want to use a local repository instead of downloadin strait from the internet then use the maven settings file to define mirrors for the individual repositories that are defined in the poms.
- If you use Nexus, then do not create repository groups containing both hosted and proxied repositories. This will dramaticly reduce the responsiveness because Nexus will check the remote locations of the proxied repositories even if a hosted repository contains the requested artifact.
Make sure you read the best practices from Sonatype as well.
