In this chapter, we focused on the Maven assembly plugin. The assembly plugin provides a way of building custom archive files and aggregating many other custom configurations and resources. Most of the Java-based products out there use the assembly plugin to build the final distribution artifacts. These can be binary distributions, source code distributions, or even documentation distributions. The chapter covered real-world examples on how to use the Maven assembly plugin in detail and finally concluded with an end-to-end sample Maven project.

In the next chapter, we will discuss Maven archetypes. Maven archetypes provide a way of reducing repetitive work when building Maven projects.