Corndel

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Creating a Maven project ​

Using VS Code ​

  1. First, make sure that the Maven for Java plugin is installed. If you installed the Extension Pack for Java, you will already have this.

  2. Press Cmd+Shift+P to open the command pallette.

  3. Run the Maven: New Module... command (Type in >maven and select the command from the list).

  4. Choose the parent directory (none), group id (com.corndel) and project name (health-tracker).

  5. Place the project in your Repos folder and open it in VS Code.

Configuring Maven ​

Every maven project contains a pom.xml. This file configures maven, dependencies, and build plugins.

Setting the Java version ​

xml
<properties>
  <maven.compiler.source>21</maven.compiler.source>
  <maven.compiler.target>21</maven.compiler.target>
</properties>

Adding dependencies ​

Dependencies will download third-party code into our project so that we can add additional functionality without writing the code ourselves.

For example, adding picocli allows us to create a command line interface application much more easily.

xml
<dependencies>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>info.picocli</groupId>
    <artifactId>picocli</artifactId>
    <version>4.7.6</version>
  </dependency>
</dependencies>

Test dependencies ​

If we want to do testing with JUnit 5, we need to add junit-jupiter-engine and assertj-core.

xml
<dependency>
  <groupId>org.junit.jupiter</groupId>
  <artifactId>junit-jupiter-engine</artifactId>
  <version>5.9.1</version>
  <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.assertj</groupId>
  <artifactId>assertj-core</artifactId>
  <version>3.23.1</version>
  <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

TIP

Note that we have put <scope>test</scope> on these. This means they will not be included in the compiled project we distribute to our users. They don't need it, the tests are only for development!

Build plugins ​

Maven splits the build lifecycle up into stages like compile, test and package.

Build plugins allow us to configure and interact with the build lifecycle.

For example, if we want to be able to run our compiled project with mvn exec:java, we can add the exec-maven-plugin:

xml
<build>
  <plugins>
    <plugin>
      <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
      <artifactId>exec-maven-plugin</artifactId>
      <version>3.0.0</version>
      <configuration>
        <mainClass>com.corndel.Main</mainClass>
      </configuration>
    </plugin>
  </plugins>
</build>

Note that we can specify the entrypoint of the app by configuring the mainClass.