Post#84.Maven Directory Structure

Maven Directory Structure

Maven has a standard directory structure. If you follow that directory structure for your project, you do not need to specify the directories of your source code, test code etc. in your POM file.

You can see the full directory layout in the Introduction to the Maven Standard Directory Layout.

Here are the most important directories:

- src

  - main

    - java

    - resources

    - webapp

  - test

    - java

    - resources

- target

The src directory is the root directory of your source code and test code. The main directory is the root directory for source code related to the application itself (not test code). The test directory contains the test source code. The java directories under main and test contains the Java code for the application itself (under main) and the Java code for the tests (under test).

The resources directory contains other resources needed by your project. This could be property files used for internationalization of an application, or something else.

The webapp directory contains your Java web application, if your project is a web application. The webappdirectory will then be the root directory of the web application. Thus the webapp directory contains the WEB-INF directory etc.

The target directory is created by Maven. It contains all the compiled classes, JAR files etc. produced by Maven. When executing the clean build phase, it is the target directory which is cleaned.