4.6. About Maven artifacts and coordinates

In the Maven build system, the basic building block is an artifact. After a build, the output of an artifact is typically an archive, such as a JAR or WAR file.

A key aspect of Maven is the ability to locate artifacts and manage the dependencies between them. A Maven coordinate is a set of values that identifies the location of a particular artifact. A basic coordinate has three values in the following form:

groupId:artifactId:version

Sometimes Maven augments a basic coordinate with a packaging value or with both a packaging value and a classifier value. A Maven coordinate can have any one of the following forms:

groupId:artifactId:version
groupId:artifactId:packaging:version
groupId:artifactId:packaging:classifier:version

Here are descriptions of the values:

Elements in an artifact’s POM file define the artifact’s group ID, artifact ID, packaging, and version, as shown here:

<project ... >
  ...
  <groupId>org.fusesource.example</groupId>
  <artifactId>bundle-demo</artifactId>
  <packaging>bundle</packaging>
  <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
  ...
</project>

To define a dependency on the preceding artifact, you would add the following dependency element to a POM file:

<project ... >
  ...
  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.fusesource.example</groupId>
      <artifactId>bundle-demo</artifactId>
      <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
  ...
</project>