Javadoc creation with maven

We have created a new artifact to generate javadoc. We have 40 artifacts defined as dep开发者_如何学运维endencies. Task is to create javadoc.jar and html pages for the 40 dependency artifacts.

Whats the best approach to achieve this in maven?

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This is very unusual. Javadoc works on sources, not compiled classes, whereas maven dependencies reference classes, not sources.

So to make this work you'll have to do all of this:

• since this is a dedicated javadoc artifact, it won't have a main JAR artifact, so you'll probably want to set the packaging to POM
• make sure all your referenced artifacts have attached sources
• add <classifier>sources</classifier> to all your dependencies
• unpack all dependencies to a common root folder using dependency:unpack-dependencies
• run javadoc on that folder
• create a jar using the maven-assembly-plugin
• attach that jar to the build using the buildhelper plugin

On re-reading the question: I'm assuming that you want to create combined docs of all dependencies. If not, you'll need 40 separate executions each of the javadoc, assembly and buildhelper plugins. Good luck with that.

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A slightly more automated approach than the answer above:

So to make this work you'll have to do all of this:

• since this is a dedicated javadoc artifact, it won't have a main JAR artifact, so you'll probably want to set the packaging to POM
• make sure all your referenced artifacts have attached sources
• add <classifier>sources</classifier> to all your dependencies
• unpack all dependencies to a common root folder using dependency:unpack-dependencies
• Change your sources directory to where you unpacked all the dependencies
• Use the source plugin to manage all the Javadoc generation and deployment