How do you specify a string of goals as the defaultGoal in maven 2?

Question

I'm just curious, is there a way to specify that you want a string of goals run as the default goal in a maven project? Is there an equivalent to Ant's <project name="MyProject" basedir="." default="main"><target name="main" depends="clean,run"/>?

Answer 1

No there is no such thing in Maven to define a default goal neither a target (which does not exist in Maven), cause you will call maven allways with a goal e.g. mvn clean or mvn package etc.

Answer 2

There is something roughly equivalent, you CAN define a default goal or phase that will be executed if none is given in the build element:

<build>
  <defaultGoal>install</defaultGoal>
  ...
</build>

But this has to be a single phase, or goal, you can't pass multiple phases/goals (not really a problem since a phase triggers all preceding phases).

Here is what the POM Reference writes about defaultGoal:

defaultGoal: the default goal or phase to execute if none is given. If a goal is given, it should be defined as it is in the command line (such as jar:jar). The same goes for if a phase is defined (such as install).

Reference

• POM Reference
  • 3.1.1 The BaseBuild Element Set