Maven Project Documentation

In this chapter, we mainly learn how to create Maven project documentation.

For example, we created the consumerBanking project in the C:/MVN directory. Maven uses the following command to quickly create a Java project:

mvn archetype:generate -DgroupId=com.companyname.bank -DartifactId=consumerBanking -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-quickstart -DinteractiveMode=false

Modify pom.xml and add the following configuration (if not already present):

<project> ... <build> <pluginManagement> <plugins> <plugin> <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId> <artifactId>maven-site-plugin</artifactId> <version>3.3</version> </plugin> <plugin> <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId> <artifactId>maven-project-info-reports-plugin</artifactId> <version>2.7</version> </plugin> </plugins> </pluginManagement> </build> ... </project>

Otherwise, running mvn sitethe command will producejava.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/maven/doxia/siterenderer/DocumentContentthe following error. This is because the maven-site-plugin version is too low; simply upgrade to 3.3+.

Open the consumerBanking folder and execute the following mvn command.

C:\MVN\consumerBanking> mvn site

Maven starts generating the documentation:

[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[INFO] -------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Building consumerBanking
[INFO]task-segment: [site]
[INFO] -------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] [site:site {execution: default-site}]
[INFO] artifact org.apache.maven.skins:maven-default-skin: 
checking for updates from central
[INFO] Generating "About" report.
[INFO] Generating "Issue Tracking" report.
[INFO] Generating "Project Team" report.
[INFO] Generating "Dependencies" report.
[INFO] Generating "Continuous Integration" report.
[INFO] Generating "Source Repository" report.
[INFO] Generating "Project License" report.
[INFO] Generating "Mailing Lists" report.
[INFO] Generating "Plugin Management" report.
[INFO] Generating "Project Summary" report.
[INFO] -------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESSFUL
[INFO] -------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 16 seconds
[INFO] Finished at: Wed Jul 11 18:11:18 IST 2012
[INFO] Final Memory: 23M/148M
[INFO] -------------------------------------------------------------------

OpenC:\MVN\consumerBanking\target\sitethe folder. Clickindex.htmland you can see the documentation.

Maven uses a document processing engine calledDoxiaDoxia to create documentation. It can read source code in various formats into a common document model. To write documentation for your project, you can write the content in the following common formats that can be converted by Doxia.

Format Name	Description	Reference
Apt	Plain text document format	http://maven.apache.org/doxia/references/apt-format.html
Xdoc	A document format of Maven 1.x	http://jakarta.apache.org/site/jakarta-site2.html
FML	Suitable for FAQ documents	http://maven.apache.org/doxia/references/fml-format.html
XHTML	Extensible HTML document	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML

Other extensions