Frequently Asked Questions

  1. What is the difference between mvn site and mvn site:site?
  2. How do I Integrate static (X)HTML pages into my Maven site?
  3. Why do my absolute links get translated into relative links?
  4. Why don't the links between parent and child modules work when I run "mvn site"?
  5. How to include a custom Doxia module, like Twiki?
What is the difference between mvn site and mvn site:site?
mvn site
Calls the site lifecycle with the associate phases (i.e. pre-site, site, post-site, site-deploy). See Lifecycle Reference.
mvn site:site
Calls the site goal from the site plugin. See site:site.
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How do I Integrate static (X)HTML pages into my Maven site?

You can integrate your static pages by following these steps:

  • Put your static pages in the resources directory, ${basedir}/src/site/resources
  • Create your site.xml and put it in ${basedir}/src/site
  • Link to the static pages by modifying the menu section, create items and map them to the filenames of the static pages
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Why do my absolute links get translated into relative links?

This happens because the Site Plugin tries to make all URLs relative, when possible. If you have something like this defined in your pom.xml: 

<url>http://www.your.site.com/</url>
and create links in your site.xml (just an example) like this: 
<links>
  <item></item>
  <item></item>
</links>
You will see that the link to "Your site" will be a relative one, but that the link to "Maven 2" will be an absolute link.

There is an issue for this in JIRA, where you can read more about this.

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Why don't the links between parent and child modules work when I run "mvn site"?

What "mvn site" will do for you, in a multi-project build, is to run "mvn site" for the parent and all its modules individually. The links between parent and child will not work here. They will however work when you deploy the site.

If you want to test this, prior to deployment, you can run the site:stage goal as described in the usage documentation instead.

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How to include a custom Doxia module, like Twiki?

The site plugin handles out-of-box apt, xdoc and fml formats. If you want to use a custom format like Twiki, you need to specify the Doxia Twiki dependency, i.e.: 

<project>
  ...
  <build>
    <plugins>
      ...
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-site-plugin</artifactId>
        <dependencies>
          <dependency>
            <groupId>org.apache.maven.doxia</groupId>
            <artifactId>doxia-module-twiki</artifactId>
            <version>1.0</version>
         </dependency>
       </dependencies>
     </plugin>
   </plugins>
 </build>
  ...
</project>

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