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I'm a bit confused between maven assembly plugin and build-helper-maven plugin. I've also read in the maven documentation that The assemblies/archive created by the Assembly Plugin gets deployed during the deployed phase.Hence, they can be deployed to the remote nexus repositories.

The purpose of maven assembly plugin is to archive many things into one(say in tar.gz format). However, the attach-artifact goal present within build-helper-maven plugin has the same role i.e.archiving,installing and deploying the artifact.

With that being said,why would anyone use both of them together? I've seen people using both of them together. Isn't one of the plugins an alternative choice of the other?

Kindly advise.

Sandy
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1 Answers1

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If you use maven-assembly-plugin you can create as you already mentioned any kind of archives (range from very simple to very complex structures) they will be by default be attached to your project which means they will be deployed into remote repositories in one go if you do mvn deploy with no supplemental configuration.

The build-helper-maven-plugin is intended to add an artifact (one goal of this plugin) which is usually not generated by Maven itself which most of the cases is a smell. If people using them together (in the use case to create an archive and attach it) this makes no sense.

Apart from that the build-helper-maven-plugin can also be used to add other source directories for example for scala, kotlin projects (other goals for example add-source etc.)

So those plugins are not alternatives they have different intentions/use cases.

khmarbaise
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