Generating Javadocs in Maven

Maven comes out with one of the cool features which does the generation of the javadocs for a project. As every developer knows that it is vital to have the code documentation of our project and this feature of maven helps to accomplish the same.

Maven uses the maven-javadoc plugin to generate the javadocs of a project. This plugin internally uses JDK\bin\javadoce.exe command to generate javadocs. When the project is deployed using mvn install command, it generates the javadocs for the project.

Maven: Configuring Javadocs Plugin

The javadoc plugin can be configure for any project in pom.xml as shown below:

<build>
	<plugins>
		<plugin>
			<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
			<artifactId>maven-javadoc-plugin</artifactId>
			<executions>
				<execution>
					<id>attach-javadocs</id>
					<goals>
						<goal>jar</goal>
					</goals>
				</execution>
			</executions>
		</plugin>
	</plugins>
</build>

Maven: Generating Javadocs

After adding the above mentioned plugin in your project's pom.xml, all you have to do is, open the command prompt, go to the project directory, For eg. D:\Java\workspace\JavaSamples and run the command maven install.

The generated javadocs can be found in the project's location : D:\Java\workspace\JavaSamples\target\apidocs.