Controlling the verbosity of the Maven output

Sometimes, the output from Maven might be too verbose and we may want to only see the errors. At other times, the information displayed by Maven may be insufficient and we want to see more details. Let us see how we can control this.

How to do it...

1. Open a Maven project.

2. Run the following command:

       mvn –q clean package 
   

3. Observe the output:

   

4. Now run the following command:

       mvn –X clean package 
   

5. Observe the output:

   

How it works...

Maven provides different levels of logging. The typical levels are DEBUG (detailed messages), INFO (information messages), and ERROR (error messages). Specifying a level displays all messages at and above that level. For instance, specifying the INFO level displays messages at the INFO and ERROR levels.

By default, Maven logs all INFO level messages to the screen.

The -q parameter tells Maven to be quiet and not display anything other than ERROR level messages on the screen. So the only display is the output from tests.

On...