java - What is "pom" packaging in maven?

Question

I was given a maven project to compile and get deployed on a tomcat server. I have never used maven before today, but I have been googling quite a bit. It seems like the top level pom.xml files in this project have the packaging type set as pom.

What am I supposed to do after mvn install to get this application deployed? I was expecting to be able to find a war file somewhere or something, but I guess I am looking in the wrong place or missing a step.

Answer 1

pom is basically a container of submodules, each submodule is represented by a subdirectory in the same directory as pom.xml with pom packaging.

Somewhere, nested within the project structure you will find artifacts (modules) with war packaging. Maven generally builds everything into /target subdirectories of each module. So after mvn install look into target subdirectory in a module with war packaging.

Of course:

$ find . -iname "*.war"

works equally well ;-).