I thought I’d document this, as we found it a bit confusing to get going, and the documentation is fairly sparse.

We wanted to knock up a quick maven plugin which would parse some XML files, and output some HTML. Great, a chance to do some groovy foo! Parsing and writing XML with groovy is so easy, we thought we’d try writing the plugin in groovy. Once compiled, groovy is just java, so Maven should not care what the plugin is written in.

First, DON’T follow these instructions: http://www.sonatype.com/books/mcookbook/reference/writing-plugins-alternative-sect-writing-groovy.html. They only work in Maven 2.

For reference, the error message when compiling the plugin:

Failed to execute goal org.codehaus.mojo.groovy:groovy-maven-plugin:1.0-beta-3:generateStubs (default) on project firstgroovy-maven-plugin: Execution default of goal org.codehaus.mojo.groovy:groovy-maven-plugin:1.0-beta-3:generateStubs failed: An API incompatibility was encountered while executing org.codehaus.mojo.groovy:groovy-maven-plugin:1.0-beta-3:generateStubs: java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: org.codehaus.plexus.PlexusContainer.hasChildContainer(Ljava/lang/String;)Z

The correct approach for maven 3 is documented here:
http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GMAVEN/Implementing+Maven+Plugins.

It still doesn’t work straight away. If you follow the guidelines and create the pom and mojo as in this page (specifiying 1.5 for the gmaven versions), the mojo appears to install but then when you execute it from another project, you get the following error:

 org.sonatype.guice.bean.reflect.Logs$JULSink warn
WARNING: Error injecting: sample.plugin.GreetingMojo
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Lorg/codehaus/groovy/reflection/ClassInfo;

The answer is on this page: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GMAVEN-110.

We need to add the following to the gmaven-plugin configuration:

<configuration>
    <providerSelection>1.5</providerSelection>
</configuration>

I’ve attached a zip containing a working mojo and a test project: groovy-maven-plugin.tar.gz. Run mvn install on the first to install it in your local repository, then mvn compile onthe second to see it execute.

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