A Maven based project uses the target folder to place the output of a project’s build. Before the deployment of a project, it is a good practice to clean every file created by the previous build.
In this example, we use Apache Maven 3.1.1 on a Windows 7 platform.
In order to clean our project, we must first navigate to its folder, using the terminal (Linux or Mac) or the command prompt (Windows). Then, we must issue the following command:
mvn clean
A sample output of the command is shown below:
This command is responsible for removing all files generated by the previous build. Thus, every file inside the target folder will be removed.
Finally, it is a good practice to use Maven’s clean command along with Maven’s package command as following:
mvn clean package
This command first, cleans our project by removing everything inside the target folder and then, packages our code in a distributable format, such as jar.
This was a tutorial on how to clean a project, using Apache Maven.
