Maven: No sources to compile

I am following the ‘Build Java Projects with Maven’ (https://spring.io/guides/gs/maven/#scratch) and when I run ‘mvn compile’ from /Users/Misha/Desktop/src/main/java/hello, I get this prompt:

[INFO] Scanning for projects...   
[INFO]                                                                                  
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------   
[INFO] Building gs-maven 0.1.0    
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------   
[INFO]    
[INFO] --- maven-resources-plugin:2.6:resources (default-resources) @ gs-maven ---   
[INFO] Using 'UTF-8' encoding to copy filtered resources.   
[INFO] Copying 3 resources   
[INFO]    
[INFO] --- maven-compiler-plugin:3.1:compile (default-compile) @ gs-maven ---   
[INFO] No sources to compile   
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------   
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESS     
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------    
[INFO] Total time: 0.942 s    
[INFO] Finished at: 2015-01-11T23:10:28-08:00   
[INFO] Final Memory: 7M/155M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have the two java files and the xml file in the hello directory, and I am assuming that I should see “Hello World!” instead of No sources to compile. Why is my java code not compiling? Thanks!

Answer

To create a maven-project you need

1. A project-directory containing the pom.xml-file
2. Within this project-directory a subdirectory src/main/java containing your java-code (packages go to subdirectories of src/main/java)

To invoke maven run mvn compile or something similar from the project-directory.