I am new to Maven, and struggling to find out how does maven decide what version of a plugin (e.g. maven-compiler) to use when no version is defined in pom.xml.
Using latest maven version 3.8.1. Created a hello-world java program and ran mvn compile. And it downloads following versions: maven-resources-plugin:2.6:resources (default-resources) maven-compiler-plugin:3.1:compile (default-compile)
maven-compiler-plugin:3.1 was released in April 2013. Latest is 3.8.1. Why is maven not using the latest version when I have not given anything specific in pom ?
Same with maven-resources-plugin:2.6. This version was released in August 2012. Latest version is 3.2.0.
I know I can define the latest versions of these plugins in pom. But why default maven is using such old versions ? Am I missing any configuration ?
Advertisement
Answer
You are missing the configuration meaning that you have to define the appropriate plugins via pluginManagement(all plugins with their versions).
If the defaults would be changed there would we a lot of project which would fail.
I can strongly recommend to define the versions given here https://maven.apache.org/plugins/
Usually the definition of plugin versions is a task for a corporate parent to have a single location define all the plugins and default configurations.