-To be defined-

I must admit I’m not really a huge fan of Maven, but I’m not going to rant how much maven sucks in this post. This tool brought quite a bit of good things to the build automation landscape in Java. Instead I will share with you how to make it a bit more pleasant to use. It’s still de facto a standard in open source world so I guess I will keep it in my toolbox for a little longer.

One of the concepts which is really handy is profile. But isn’t it a bit annoying when you make a typo in the name to discover it only after the whole build is done? Wouldn’t it be cool to have autocompletion in the command line? Something like:

There is a simple way of enabling it in bash - very nice autocompletion script. Run this commands then restart your shell. You will be few keystrokes ahead.

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$ curl https://raw.github.com/juven/maven-bash-completion/master/bash_completion.bash >>  \
.maven_bash_completion.sh && echo 'source ~/.maven_bash_completion.sh' >> ~/.bashrc

Pimp your Maven

Here’s something extra (meaning it does not bring any value for lazy guys I guess). Maven is well known for being a chatterbox, next to its passion for downloading the whole internet once in a while. It would be pretty handy to mark failures in red, warnings in yellow and so on and so forth. This sed script will do the job. Run following snippet and enjoy the rainbow!

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$ curl https://raw.github.com/builddoctor/maven-antsy-color/master/mvn >>  \
.maven_colorized.sh && echo 'source ~/.maven_colorized.sh' >> ~/.bashrc

If you have some other cool tips just leave a comment!