Aliases for Performing Project Analysis with Maven

To check for plugin or dependency updates of a Maven project the versions-maven-plugin has two interesting mojos:

mvn versions:display-plugin-updates

mvn versions:display-dependency-updates

Unfortunately the command line is a bit long. Cumbersome to type, not that easy to remember. Using the alias-maven-plugin the command line can be shortened to:

pu

du

In addition to that checking a project for declaring all dependencies (that is not relying on transitive dependencies) or not declaring unused dependencies is a common task to keep the project dependencies clean. The maven-dependency-plugin provides the analyze mojo for this:

mvn dependency:analyze

In short this would be

a

The configuration to make this work looks like this:

  <br />
    Aliases to analyze project information.<br />
  

  

    a

    mvn dependency:analyze

    <br />
      Analyzes the dependencies of this project and determines which are: used and declared;<br />
      used and undeclared; unused and declared. This goal is intended to be used standalone,<br />
      thus it always executes the test-compile phase - use the dependency:analyze-only goal<br />
      instead when participating in the build lifecycle.<br />
<br />
      <p><br />
        For more information please refer to the<br />
        <a href="http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-dependency-plugin/analyze-mojo.html">analyze mojo</a>.<br />
      </p><br />
    

  

  

    pu

    mvn versions:display-plugin-updates

    <br />
      Displays all plugins that have newer versions available.<br />
      <p><br />
        For more information please refer to the<br />
        <a href="http://mojo.codehaus.org/versions-maven-plugin/display-plugin-updates-mojo.html">display-plugin-updates mojo</a>.<br />
      </p><br />
    

  

  

    du

    mvn versions:display-dependency-updates

    <br />
      Displays all dependencies that have newer versions available.<br />
      <p><br />
        For more information please refer to the<br />
        <a href="http://mojo.codehaus.org/versions-maven-plugin/display-dependency-updates-mojo.html">display-dependency-updates<br />
        		 mojo</a>.<br />
      </p><br />
    

  

The comment elements are optional, but help teams to share information about the aliases.

And if you can't remember all the shortcuts? Type h!

--- project-analysis

a   = mvn dependency:analyze [args]

pu  = mvn versions:display-plugin-updates [args]

du  = mvn versions:display-dependency-updates [args]

For more information please refer to the alias-maven-plugin and (for an example configuration) config-smartics-alias.