Maven archetypes to create your project folder structure

Maven archetypes are useful for many things, including creating a folder structure to start with, even if you aren’t planning to use maven as your build tool. See a list of available archetypes here.

The easiest way to create a maven project structure is to use the quickstart archetype. For example:

mvn archetype:generate -DgroupId=com.shaunabram -DartifactId=my-app -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-quickstart -DinteractiveMode=false

This creates

my-app
|-- pom.xml
`-- src
    |-- main
    |   `-- java
    |       `-- com
    |           `-- shaunabram
    `-- test
        `-- java
            `-- com
                `-- shaunabram
                    `-- AppTest.java

Note this doesn’t create the (src/main/) resources folder. This posting suggests creating your own custom archetype. Creating the folder manually isn’t too big a deal though.

If you’re creating a web app, a better alternative to the quickstart archetype is to use the webapp archectype.

mvn archetype:generate -DgroupId=com.shaunabram -DartifactId=my-webapp -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-webapp

This creates

my-webapp
   |-src
   |---main
   |-----resources
   |-----webapp
   |-------index.jsp
   |-------WEB-INF
   |---------web.xml
   |-pom.xml

More details on Maven’s standard-directory-layout.

Followup: I created a Maven archetype to create a new project with a layout that is essentially a combination of what you get with the standard maven archetypes of quickstart and webapp. See maven-archetype-quickweb.