Building a java software project typically includes some activities as follows:
Compiling all the source code
Packaging the compiled code into a JAR or WAR archive file
Deploying the packaged archives files on a server
Manually performing all these tasks is time-consuming and is prone to errors. Therefore, we take the help of a build tool. A build tool is a tool that automates everything related to building a software project, from compiling to deploying.
There are other build tools that are available for building Java projects such as Gradle and Ant. We are going to use Maven as our build tool. Let's take a look at how we can install Maven:
Go to Maven's download page at http://maven.apache.org/download.cgi.
Click on the apache-maven-3.3.9-bin.zip download link and start the download.
Once the download is finished, go to the downloaded directory and extract the
.zip
file into a convenient directory of your choice.Now we need to create one more environment variable called
M2_HOME
in a way that is similar to the way in which we createdJAVA_HOME
. Enter the extracted Maven zip directory's path as the value for theM2_HOME
environment variable.Finally, append the
M2_HOME
variable to thePATH
environment variable as well. Double-click on the path variable and click on the New button to enter%M2_HOME%\bin
as the value.Now we have installed the Maven build tool in our computer. To verify whether our installation has been carried out correctly, we need to follow steps that are similar to the Java installation verification. Open a new command window, type
mvn -version
and press Enter; you will see the following details of the Maven version:C:\Users\Amuthan>mvn -version Apache Maven 3.3.9 (bb52d8502b132ec0a5a3f4c09453c07478323dc5; 2015-11-10T10:41:47-06:00) Maven home: C:\Program Files\apache-maven-3.3.9 Java version: 1.8.0_91, vendor: Oracle Corporation Java home: C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.0_91\jre Default locale: en_US, platform encoding: Cp1252 OS name: "windows 10", version: "10.0", arch: "amd64", family: "dos"