Configuring Maven to search for plugins

You will recall that in the section on using the Maven JaCoCo plugin, to generate code coverage we had to explicitly specify the projectId and artifactId values of the plugin to it from the command line. However, for most other plugins, we specified the plugin name without additional information.

We will see why we had to do this and how to avoid it.

How to do it...

1. Open the settings file (specifically the settings.xml file in your home directory).

2. Add the following section:

   <pluginGroups>
       <pluginGroup>org.jacoco</pluginGroup>
   </pluginGroups>

3. Run the following command on the same project for which you ran JaCoCo earlier:

   mvn clean jacoco:prepare-agent test jacoco:report
   

4. Observe the output:

   [INFO]
   [INFO] --- jacoco-maven-plugin:0.7.2.201409121644:report (default-cli) @ project-with-tests ---
   [INFO] Analyzed bundle 'Project with Tests' with 1 classes
   

How it works...

There are two types of Maven plugins, which are as follows:

• Plugins...