I’m using the maven jar plugin, and I want to exclude the pom file from our resultant jars. The obvious choice would be to have an “excludes” section in my jar plugin configuration, like this:

<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-jar-plugin</artifactId>
<version>2.3.1</version>
<configuration>
<excludes>
<exclude>**/pom.xml</exclude>
</excludes>
</configuration>
</plugin>

Obvious, but wrong. Then I read that there’s an “excludePomFiles” flag which you can set to true, so I tried that, and that didn’t work either.

The solution was to use the MavenArchiveConfiguration’s “AddMavenDescriptor” method, like this:

<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-jar-plugin</artifactId>
<version>2.3.1</version>
<configuration>
<archive>
<addMavenDescriptor>false</addMavenDescriptor>
</archive>
</configuration>
</plugin>