Documenting with the Maven Site plugin

Along with the clean and default lifecycle, Maven also consists of a site lifecycle. Like clean, site is implemented by a Maven plugin, in this case, the Maven Site plugin.

Getting ready

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

How to do it...

Use the following steps to generate documentation using the Maven Site plugin:

1. Open one of the Maven projects for which we need to generate a site report (for instance, project-with-documentation).

2. Run the following command:

   mvn site
   

3. Observe the output as shown in the following screenshot:

   

4. Open the index.html file generated in the target/site folder:

   

How it works...

Site is one of the Maven lifecycles. When the mvn site command is run, it invokes the site phase of the site lifecycle. The site goal of the Maven Site plugin is bound to this phase and is invoked.

The site goal performs a series of steps to generate the report. It uses...