How to Display a Message in Maven

How to Display a Message in Maven

Maven is a powerful build automation tool used for building Java-based projects, and it has many features that allow you to customize the way builds are run. One of these features is the ability to display messages during the build process, which can be useful for providing information about the build or troubleshooting issues. In this tutorial, we'll cover how to add and configure a message to display during your Maven build.

Adding a Message to your pom.xml File

The first step is to add a <message> element to your pom.xml file. This element can be added to any phase of your build process as long as the <build> element is present. For example, to add a message to the compile phase, you would add the following:

<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>3.6.1</version>
            <configuration>
                <message>This is a message to be displayed in the console.</message>
            </configuration>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>

Once you've added the message element, it will be displayed in the console output when the corresponding phase is executed.

HTML Formatting for Messages

By default, messages are formatted as plain text, but you can also add HTML formatting to make your messages easier to read. To do this, you'll need to add the htmlFormat attribute to your message element and set its value to true. Here's an example:

<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>3.6.1</version>
            <configuration>
                <message htmlFormat="true"><b>This is an important message!</b></message>
            </configuration>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>

Now your message will be displayed with bold text in the console output.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we've covered how to add and configure a message to display during your Maven build. Messages can be used to provide information about the build or troubleshoot issues, and they can be formatted using HTML tags to make them easier to read. With this knowledge, you'll be able to incorporate messages into your Maven build process with ease.