Bootstraps a Maven project. Because archetypes shouldn’t be so complicated.

Mvnizer is ideal to create a throwaway Maven project that adds junit as a dependency and sets up the Maven project structure.

Mvnizer can be installed as follows:

$ gem install mvnizer

To work on Mvnizer itself, you can use the provided Dockerfile.

$ docker build -t mvnizer-dev .
$ docker run -it -v $(pwd):/usr/src/app mvnizer-dev

Mvnizer is used as follows:

$ mvnizer new <coordinates>

The coordinates can have the following format:

<group:>artifact<:version><:type>

with the values between angled brackets optional. type can only have one of the following three values: jar (default), war or pom. This command creates a project in the artifact folder, populating the proper values in the pom file.

Here are some examples of valid commands:

mvnizer new foo
mvnizer new foo:war
mvnizer new foo:1.0.0:war
mvnizer new com.example:foo
mvnizer new com.example:foo:war
mvnizer new com.example:foo:1.0.0:war

The version must be of the form major.minor.patch-classifier.

The following options can be used to add specific files to the project:

--docker

this creates a Dockerfile based on the Java 11 distroless base image. It assumes that the jar generated by the build can be executed using the java -jar command;

--main=[Main class name]

this creates a class with a main method that can be executed using the java -jar command. It also adds the maven-shade-plugin to the pom, with this class as the main class.

--logger

this adds logging dependencies to the project. The jar added are defined as the logging_deps of the configuration file. The default are:

logging_deps: [ "org.slf4j:slf4j-api:2.0.17:jar",
                "org.slf4j:slf4j-simple:2.0.17:jar",
                "ch.qos.logback:logback-core:1.5.26:jar" ]

If the type of project generated is war, a servlet (ExampleServlet) is generated, along with a JSP file and an empty web.xml file.

When running the Jetty plugin, e.g.:

mvn org.eclipse.jetty:jetty-maven-plugin:11.0.26:run-war

The example can then be accessed at http://localhost:8080/hello

To add dependencies, you must be in the folder where the pom file you want to add the dependency to is.

To add a dependency, simply pass the coordinates of the dependency, and add scope if needed (if no scope is given, compile is assumed):

mvnizer add org.apache.commons:commons-lang3:3.1:jar
mvnizer add org.mockito:mockito-core:1.9.5-rc1:jar:test

The search features makes it easy to find the coordinates of the dependencies for you.

You can search for dependencies in the Maven central repository with the command:

$ mvnizer search <text>

MIT License.

© Copyright 2012–2026 — Sébastien Le Callonnec