Maven Archetypes Catalog Plugin for IntelliJ IDEA

IntelliJ IDEA is not able to fetch external Maven Archetype Catalog files (archetype-catalog.xml). To use custom Maven Archetypes, you had to add external Maven Archetypes manually.

This plugin for IntelliJ IDEA allows you to define a list of external Maven Archetype Catalog files. Those files are fetched and the containing Maven Archetypes are made available in IntelliJ IDEA when creating new Maven projects.

Note: Functionality to manage Archetypes has been integrated in IntelliJ 2022. So this plugin is no longer needed for IntelliJ 2022 and above!

Usage

Install the plugin.

It adds a new entry Maven Archetype Catalogs to the Settings menu at File - Settings - Build, Execution and Deployment - Build tools.

Here you can add additional URLs or choose local files pointing to archetype-catalog.xml files. If you need to authenticate to a reposistory, use an URL like 'http://[username]:[password]@[url]'. After adding those Catalog files the Archetypes present in these files will be available when creating new Maven projects or Maven modules.

When you define a property archetypeCatalog in your pom.xml or declare a configuration for the org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-archetype-plugin in your pom.xml, these settings will be automatically imported. The property archetypeCatalog supports local, remote, file- or http(s)-based URLs. See http://maven.apache.org/archetype/maven-archetype-plugin/generate-mojo.html#archetypeCatalog for additional information.

By checking the option Skip Repository Definition you can suppress the parameter -DarchetypeRepository when creating new projects. Be sure to define required repositories in your settings.xml. Setting this option may help if you are affected by Maven Archetype / ARCHETYPE-519 - archetype:generate with specified remote archetypeCatalog falls back to internal catalog.

Development

The project is build up using Maven. The IntelliJ IDEA libraries are not present in the global Maven repository, so they need to be installed in your local repository or in your company repository.

You can install the required libraries using the install.cmd script file. Otherwise you can see the paths and the required maven instructions to install the artifacts in the pom.xml.

To be able to debug the plugin, you need to install an additional IDEA plugin Intellij plugin development with Maven. This plugin tells IntelliJ IDEA to handle the module as a plugin module instead of a java module.

Additionally you have to manually configure the path to the plugin.xml in the module settings. Best practice would be to point to target/classes.

At last, you have to create an IntelliJ IDEA SDK and provide the name of the SDK in the property intellij.idea.sdk.name (probably in a maven profile).

Extensions

This plugin provides an extension point archetypeCatalogDefinition in the namespace de.dm.intellij.maven-archetypes-catalog-plugin. Here you can add your custom Archetype Catalog files required for your IntelliJ plugins.

The Interface is available in a JFrog Bintray repository. To use it, add the following repository to your pom.xml:

            <dependencies>
                <dependency>
                  <groupId>de.dm.intellij</groupId>
                  <artifactId>maven-archetypes-catalog-openapi</artifactId>
                  <version>1.4.0</version>
                </dependency>
            </dependencies>
            ...
            <repositories>
                <repository>
                    <snapshots>
                        <enabled>false</enabled>
                    </snapshots>
                    <id>bintray-dmarks-maven</id>
                    <name>bintray</name>
                    <url>http://dl.bintray.com/dmarks/maven</url>
                </repository>
            </repositories>