Maven Conventions

This document defines some conventions that Maven recommends projects adopt. This is especially important if you intend to distribute your project publicly.

Artifact Naming

This section outlines the naming conventions used in the Maven project object model (POM). This document is an attempt to try and unify the many various ways projects name the artifacts that they publish for general consumption by the Java developer community (regardless of whether they are using Maven).

The first thing you will do when creating a project is to select a group ID and an artifact ID. If you are building a project to be part of a larger product that is already using Maven, you should attempt to follow any patterns already established by other projects for consistency.

These identifiers should be comprised of lowercase letters, digits, and hyphens only.

In general you should select a group ID that describes the entire product, and artifact IDs that are the basis of filenames for each item you distribute. The artifact ID may or may not overlap the group ID.

For example:

maven : maven-core
maven : wagon-api

As previously mentioned, the artifact ID should be the basis of the filename for the project, as by default Maven will use that and the version to assemble the filename. Having the version as part of the filename is strongly recommended to ensure that the version can be determined at a glance without having to check a possibly non-existant manifest, or compare file sizes with the official releases.

Following these guidelines are particularly encouraged when distributing via the Maven Repository, to ensure that it can easily fit alongside other projects and reduce the risk of conflicts and confusion.

Directory Structure

Maven encourages a common directory structure for a project. For more information on this please refer to our Introduction to the standard directory structure.