Provides goals aimed at helping to make sense out of the build environment. It includes the ability to view the effective POM and settings files, after inheritance and active profiles have been applied, as well as a describe a particular plugin goal to give usage information.

Plugin coordinates:

• Group Id: org.apache.maven.plugins
  
• Artifact Id: maven-help-plugin
  

Plugin Prefix: help

The help plugin has the following goals:

• help: Displays help information on maven-help-plugin.
  
  
• describe: Displays a list of the attributes for a Maven Plugin and/or goals (aka Mojo - Maven plain Old Java Object).
  
  
• system: Displays a list of the platform details like system properties and environment variables.
  
  
• effective-pom: Displays the effective POM as an XML for this build.
  
  
• effective-settings: Displays the calculated settings as XML for this project.
  
  
• active-profiles: Displays a list of the profiles which are currently active for this build.
  
  
• all-profiles: Displays a list of available profiles under the current project.
  
  
• evaluate: Evaluates Maven expressions given by the user in an interactive mode.
  

The goal help gives general information about the help plugin and lists its goals.
The parameter detail gives detailed information about the parameters of the goals of the help plugin.
$ mvn help:help $ mvn help:help -Ddetail=true
If you need to use the plugin's coordinates instead of its prefix, you can do that as following:
$ mvn org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-help-plugin:3.3.0:help $ mvn org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-help-plugin:3.3.0:help -Ddetail=true
The parameter goal gives information about a goal of the help plugin.
The following example show the information about the goal help:
$ mvn help:help -Dgoal=help $ mvn help:help -Dgoal=help -Ddetail=true

The goal describe gives information about a maven plugin and lists its goals.
This goal can be used with any maven plugin including the help plugin itself.

Usage: To use the goal describe (mvn help:describe), you must specify either:

• a 'cmd' parameter,
  
• or a 'plugin' parameter,
  
• or both 'groupId' and 'artifactId' parameters.
  

To display the list of parameters of the goal describe, use one of the following commands:
$ mvn help:describe -Dplugin=help -Dgoal=describe -Ddetail=true
$ mvn help:help -Dgoal=describe -Ddetail=true
Here are some examples of how to use the goal describe:

• mvn help:describe -Dcmd=<phase-name> $ mvn help:describe -Dcmd=install
  
• mvn help:describe -Dcmd=<plugin-prefix:goal-name> $ mvn help:describe -Dcmd="help:describe"
  
• mvn help:describe -Dplugin=<plugin-prefix> $ mvn help:describe -Dplugin=help
  
• mvn help:describe -Dplugin=<plugin-group-id:plugin-artifact-id> $ mvn help:describe -Dplugin="org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-help-plugin"
  
• mvn help:describe -Dplugin=<plugin-group-id:plugin-artifact-id:plugin-version> $ mvn help:describe -Dplugin="org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-help-plugin:3.3.0"
  
• mvn help:describe -DgroupId=<plugin-group-id> -DartifactId=<plugin-artifact-id> $ mvn help:describe -DgroupId="org.apache.maven.plugins" -DartifactId="maven-help-plugin"
  
• mvn help:describe -DgroupId=<plugin-group-id> -DartifactId=<plugin-artifact-id> -Dversion=<plugin-version> $ mvn help:describe -DgroupId="org.apache.maven.plugins" -DartifactId="maven-help-plugin" -Dversion="3.3.0"