How to create empty folders with maven archetype?

Question

There is an existing issue for this approach, located on Codehaus JIRA #ARCHETYPE-57, but all instructions listed in this ticket failed for me. Also the blog post of marekdec Ho

Answer 1

I did a quick test and... it worked for me. First, I created an archetype:

$ mvn archetype:generate -B -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-archetype \
                            -DgroupId=com.stackoverflow \
                            -DartifactId=Q2786966 \
                            -Dversion=1.0-SNAPSHOT \

I renamed the archetype.xml into archetype-metadata.xml (the former is for Archetype 1.0.X, the later is for Archetype 2.0.X) so the project looks like:

$ tree .
.
├── pom.xml
└── src
    └── main
        └── resources
            ├── archetype-resources
            │   ├── pom.xml
            │   └── src
            │       ├── main
            │       │   └── java
            │       │       └── App.java
            │       └── test
            │           └── java
            │               └── AppTest.java
            └── META-INF
                └── maven
                    └── archetype-metadata.xml

And archetype-metadata.xml contains:

  
    
      src/main/webapp
    
    
      src/main/java
      
        **/*.java
      
    
  

Then I installed the archetype and used it to create a project:

$ mvn install
$ cd ~/tmp
$ mvn archetype:generate -B -DarchetypeGroupId=com.stackoverflow \
                            -DarchetypeArtifactId=Q2786966 \
                            -DarchetypeVersion=1.0-SNAPSHOT \
                            -DgroupId=my.group \
                            -DartifactId=my-artifact \
                            -Dversion=1.0-SNAPSHOT

And the resulting project looks like this:

$ tree my-artifact/
my-artifact/
├── pom.xml
└── src
    └── main
        ├── java
        │   └── my-group
        │       └── App.java
        └── webapp

The empty webapp directory is there.