String arrays as command line arguments for maven plugin
arguments, command-line, maven-2, maven-plugin
Solution
You can't do it directly as far as I know, but it is pretty common practice to accept a delimited String and split that into an array yourself.
For example the maven-site-plugin allows you to specify a comma-delimited String of locales, while the maven-scala-plugin handles this by allowing you to define the arguments with a pipe separator. You can look at the relevant Mojos to see how the argument is processed.
Some example usages below:
site-plugin:
-Dlocales=enGB,frFR
scala-plugin:
-DaddArgs=arg1|arg2|arg3
Update: if you want to handle this more elegantly, you could use maven-shared-io to allow definition of an external descriptor file, then pass the descriptor location as a property. This means a single command-line argument can reference a structure of configuration.
If this sounds like it might work for you, have a look at this answer that describes how to use external descriptors in the properties plugin, or this answer that does similar for the xml-maven-plugin. Or you can just look at the assembly-plugin for ideas.
Problem
I'm writing a maven plugin that has a parameter that's a String[]. Like this: ``` /** * @parameter expression="${args}" */ protected String[] args; ``` This can be utilized through the POM like this: ``` <args> <arg>arg1</arg> <arg>arg2</arg> <args> ``` But I want to send it in from the command line ``` -Dargs={arg1, arg2} ``` Is this possible?