As discussed before, the assembly plugin currently has only two active goals: single and help; all the others are deprecated. As we witnessed in the previous example, the single goal is responsible for creating the archive with all sort of other configurations.

The following command shows how to execute the help goal of the assembly plugin. This has to be executed from a directory that has a POM file:

$ mvn assembly:help -Ddetail=true

If you see the following error when you run this command, you might not have the latest version. Update the plugin version to 2.4.1 or higher:

[ERROR] Could not find goal 'help' in plugin org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-assembly-plugin:2.2-beta-2 among available goals assembly, attach-assembly-descriptor, attach-component-descriptor, attached, directory-inline, directory, directory-single, single, unpack -> [Help 1]