Installing Maven

Maven is a popular build tool for Java development. Some important open source projects were built using this tool. There are features that facilitate the build process, standardize the project structure, and provide some guidelines for best practices development.

We will install Maven, but the installation step should be executed after the OpenJDK installation.

Open a terminal and execute the following:

sudo apt-get install maven -y

Check the installation using this command:

mvn -version

You should see the following output, although the version may be different for you:

Well done. Now we have Maven installed. Maven has a vibrant community that produces many plugins to help developers with important tasks. There are plugins to execute a unit test and plugins to prepare the project for the release event that can be integrated with SCM software.

We will use the spring boot maven plugin and docker maven plugin. The first converts our application to a JAR file and the second enables us to integrate with Docker Engine to create images, run containers, and much more. In the next few chapters, we will learn how to configure and interact with these plugins.