Running Java programs with the exec goal

Special treatment of some command line arguments and configuration parameters facilitate the running of Java programs in external processes.

Note: With the exec goal, there are some confusion caused by the almost duplication of functionality between the arguments and commandlineArgs configuration parameters.

• If commandlineArgs is specified, it will be used as is, except for replacing %classpath and %modulepath with their matching path using dependencies
• Otherwise if the property exec.args is specified, it will be used
• Otherwise the list of argument, classpath and modulepath will be parsed and used

mvn exec:exec -Dexec.executable="java" [...] -Dexec.args="%classpath"

        <configuration>
          <executable>java</executable>
          <arguments>
            <argument>-classpath</argument>
            <!-- automatically creates the classpath using all project dependencies,
                 also adding the project build directory -->
            <classpath/>
            <argument>com.example.Main</argument>
            ...
          </arguments>
        </configuration>
-------------------

 or if one wants to restrict the dependencies in the classpath:

-------------------
        <configuration>
          <executable>java</executable>
          <arguments>
            <argument>-classpath</argument>
            <classpath>
              <dependency>commons-io:commons-io</dependency>
              <dependency>commons-lang:commons-lang</dependency>
            </classpath>
            <argument>com.example.Main</argument>
            ...
          </arguments>
        </configuration>

In case of the modules as supported since Java9 the configuration looks like

        <configuration>
          <executable>java</executable>
          <arguments>
            <argument>--module-path</argument> <!-- or -p  -->
            <!-- automatically creates the modulepath using all project dependencies,
                 also adding the project build directory -->
            <modulepath/>
            <argument>--module</argument> <!-- or -m -->
            <argument>mymodule/com.example.Main</argument>
            ...
          </arguments>
        </configuration>