Maven's archetype itself is a plugin. The generate goal of the archetype plugin is used to generate a Maven project from an archetype. Let's start with a simple example:

$ mvn archetype:generate -DgroupId=com.packt.samples
                         -DartifactId=com.packt.samples.archetype
                         -Dversion=1.0.0
                         -DinteractiveMode=false

This command will invoke the generate goal of the Maven archetype plugin to create a simple Java project. You will see that the following project structure is created with a sample POM file. The name of the root or the base directory is derived from the value of the artifactId parameter:

com.packt.samples.archetype
               |-pom.xml
               |-src
               |-main/java/com/packt/samples/App.java
               |-test/java/com/packt/samples/AppTest.java

The sample POM file will only have a dependency to the junit JAR file, with test as scope:

<project>
  <modelVersion>4...