Using the Maven Clean plugin

When a project is built, it is important to ensure that it is not adversely affected by artifacts of an earlier build. Usually, build tools generate artifacts in a well-defined folder, namely the target folder, called project working directory. Before a new build, this folder is usually deleted.

Getting ready

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

How to do it...

Let's start using the Maven Clean plugin by performing the following steps:

1. Open the command prompt.
2. Run the following Maven command in the simple Maven project that we created in the Creating a simple project with Maven recipe in Chapter 1, Getting Started:

   mvn clean

3. Observe the various steps that get executed:

   [INFO] --- maven-clean-plugin:2.4.1:clean (default-clean) @ simple-project ---
   [INFO] Deleting C:\projects\apache-maven-cookbook\simple-project\target
   

   If there are no files/folders to delete, you will not...