Send Maven output to console and log file using pom

Question

Question: When running Maven in Eclipse, how do I send the console output to file?

I would like to achieve this using a pom setting or a maven plugin. I do not want to modify the run configurations or the maven system settings.

For reference, I am using Windows 7, Eclipse Luna, Java 6, Maven 3.

Answer 1

As per official command line options you could use -l,--log-file <arg> which provide the:

Log file where all build output will go.

As such, running:

mvn clean install -l output.log

Would not print anything to the console and automatically redirect the whole build output to the output.log file.

If you don't want to type it every time (or you actually don't want to use the command line) and you want it as default option (although rare case I would suppose), you could use new command line options behavior available since version 3.3.1 and have a .mvn folder where the concerned pom.xml file is located and a maven.config file in it simply providing the following line:

-l output.log

That is, the .mvn/maven.config file replaces MAVEN_OPTIONS just for its project, locally where it has been created, with the options it provides, not impacting other builds as per Maven settings of MAVEN_OPTIONS.

This is an IDE agnostic solution (it's a new built-in feature of Maven) and local to a project, but still not provided via simple POM editing, which cannot be achieved since the first phase of Maven default life cycle phases is validate, which:

validate the project is correct and all necessary information is available

That is, during the build, hence when the build has already started (and generated output), it validates the pom.xml file, hence too late to redirect build output at that stage based on some POM properties/plugin.