Configuring a 'short-hand' to invoke Monitor Mojo

By default Maven expects all Maven plugin artifacts:

1. to belong to the group org.apache.maven.plugins
2. to have the artifactId follow pattern maven-xxxx-plugin, where xxxx can serve as a short-hand prefix to invoke a Mojo from a Maven plugin.

   For our case we need to let Maven know that our plugin's groupId and artifactId are different from what Maven expects by default.

   So we define for our Maven plugin a plugin prefix via our plugin's pom.xml.

   To do this, we add the following to our pom.xml under the <project> element.

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <project>
     .
     .
     .
     <build>
       <plugins>
         <plugin>
           <artifactId>maven-plugin-plugin</artifactId>
           <configuration>
             <goalPrefix>website</goalPrefix>
           </configuration>
         </plugin>
       </plugins>
     </build>
   </project>  
   

   This tells Maven to use website as a plugin prefix or a 'short-hand' to allow invoking available Mojo(s) from our plugin.

3. Next we add the groupId of our Maven plugin in Maven settings file. This is available under ~/.m2/settings.xml.
4. Edit it and add the following:

   <settings>
     .
     .
     .
     <pluginGroups>
       <pluginGroup>org.codehaus.plexus</pluginGroup>
     </pluginGroups>
   </settings>

   This should allow our Mojo to be invoked from the command prompt without have the need to type fully qualified reference to MonitorMojo (org.codehaus.plexus:plexus-website-monitor-plugin:monitor), and by simply typing:

    mvn website:monitor

   A more definitive reference on plugin prefix resolution is available here on the Maven website.

Configuring list of websites

We will come back to configuring the MonitorMojo but before we do that we'll look at setting up unit tests for it.

Next: Setting up Mojo unit tests