Understanding project inheritance

There are times when you might want a project to use values from another .pom file. You may be building a large software product, so you do not want to repeat the dependency and other elements multiple times.

Maven provides a feature called project inheritance for this. Maven allows a number of elements specified in the parent pom file to be merged to the inheriting project. In fact, the super pom file is an example of project inheritance.

Getting ready

Maven is set up on your system and is verified to work. To do this, refer to Chapter 1, Getting Started.

How to do it...

1. Open a project that has inheritance; project-with-inheritance in our case. This has a subfolder named child, which is the project that inherits from the parent.

2. Update the parent pom file as follows:

       <groupId>com.packt.cookbook</groupId>
       <artifactId>project-with-inheritance</artifactId>
       <packaging>pom</packaging>
       <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT&lt...