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Plugins & Goals

2 roadmaps32 questions

The plugin subsystem end to end: how plugins are resolved, configured, bound to phases, and written from scratch. Interviewers dig here because in Maven everything that actually happens is a plugin goal.

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What does it take to write your own Maven plugin, and what are the key annotations and packaging involved?

level: seniorimportance: nice to knowfreq 25%

basics

~10 s

Create a project with <packaging>maven-plugin</packaging>, depend on maven-plugin-api, and write a class extending AbstractMojo. Annotate it with @Mojo(name="...") and @Parameter fields, implement execute(), and the maven-plugin-plugin generates the descriptor.

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Compare core extensions (.mvn/extensions.xml) versus build extensions (<build><extensions>): when does each load, and why does it matter?

level: principalimportance: nice to knowfreq 18%

basics

~10 s

Core extensions in .mvn/extensions.xml load before the POM is read, so they can change project loading itself. Build extensions in <build><extensions> load later, while building an already-parsed project, so they're limited to build-time machinery.

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