The extension scans pom.xml in your workspace, and displays all Maven projects and their modules in the sidebar.

The extension parse effective-pom of Maven projects, and displays all plugins and plugin goals hierarchically.

The extension provides Maven specific completion suggestions when editing POM files, including snippets and artifact hints.

It preserves history of goals for each project, so you can fast re-run previous long commands, e.g. mvn <goals> -Dparam1=value1 -Dparam2=value2 -Dparam3=value3 ... There are 2 entries for it:

• Command Palette -> select Maven: History ... -> Select a project -> Select command from the history
• Right-click on a project -> Click History ... -> Select command from the history

Generate from Maven Archetype

The extension loads archetypes listed in local/remote catalog. After selection, the extension sends mvn archetype:generate -D... to terminal. There are 2 entries for it:

• Command Palette -> select Maven: Generate from Maven Archetype
• Right-click on a folder -> Click Generate from Maven Archetype

Update Maven Archetype Catalog

With following steps, you can update the local cache of Maven remote catalog. It takes some time to download meta data from Maven central repository.

Command Palette -> select Maven: Update Maven Archetype Catalog.

This extension executes Maven by opening a terminal session and then calling Maven in that session. Maven requires the JAVA_HOME environment variable to be set. Maven will also look for other variables such as MAVEN_OPTS. If you prefer not to set those variables permanently you can configure them, or any other environment variable, in settings:

{
    "maven.terminal.customEnv": [
        {
            "environmentVariable": "MAVEN_OPTS",               // variable name
            "value": "-Xms1024m -Xmx4096m"                     // value
        },
        {
            "environmentVariable": "JAVA_HOME",                // variable name
            "value": "C:\\Program Files\\Java\\jdk-9.0.4"      // value
        }
    ]
}

If you have Red Hat's Java Language Support extension installed, then you can specify JAVA_HOME in settings for that extension:

{
    "java.home": "C:\\Program Files\\Java\\jdk-9.0.4"      // Red Hat Java Language Support Setting
}

This extension (Maven for Java) can reuse that setting if you desire:

{
    "maven.terminal.useJavaHome": true      // Use the Red Hat Java Language Support Setting for JAVA_HOME
}

With this support, you can specify JAVA_HOME in one place and you do not need to use the maven.terminal.customEnv setting unless you have other environment variables to set.

If you have JAVA_HOME configured through the maven.terminal.customEnv setting, and also specify to reuse the Red Hat setting, then the value from maven.terminal.customEnv will take precedence.

usage: mvn [options] [<goal(s)>] [<phase(s)>]

You can use maven.executable.options to specify default options for all your Maven commands executed in current project.

{
    "maven.executable.options": "-o -s ./settings.xml"      // work offline, and use an alternative settings file 
}

To speed up the searching of Maven projects, you can exclude folders in settings:

{
    "maven.excludedFolders": [
        "**/.*",                // exclude hidden folders
        "**/node_modules",      // exclude node modules to speed up
        "**/target"             // exclude duplicated pom file in target folder
    ]
}

Specify a favorite command in settings:

{
    "maven.terminal.favorites": [
        {
            "alias": "full-build without tests",
            "command": "clean package -DskipTests"
        }
    ]
}

Now right-click on an project item, and then click Favorite .... The option full-build without tests should show up.