The Maven Clean Plugin removes all the resources like files and directories created during the previous build. It also cleans up the target directory by default.

Goal:

The Clean Plugin only has one goal.

clean:clean attempts to clean a project’s working directory of the files that we’re generated at build-time. By default, it discovers and deletes the directories configured in project.build.directory, project.build.outputDirectory, project.build.testOutputDirectory, and project.reporting.outputDirectory.

Configuration:

1. Delete additional files from a directory – Following configuration will add additional directory to be cleaned up. It will also include some specific file types and exclude some files which will not be cleaned up.

<build>
  <plugins>
  <plugin>
    <artifactId>maven-clean-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>3.1.0</version>
    <configuration>
      <filesets>
        <fileset>
          <directory>results</directory>
          <includes>
            <include>**/*.html</include>
            <include>**/*.json</include>
          </includes>
          <excludes>
            <exclude>**/cucumber.html</exclude>
            <exclude>**/cucumber.json</exclude>
          </excludes>
        </fileset>
      </filesets>
    </configuration>
  </plugin>
 </plugins>
</build>

2. Skip Clean – The following configuration will skip running the cleanup.

<build>
  <plugins>
    <plugin>
      <artifactId>maven-clean-plugin</artifactId>
      <version>3.1.0</version>
      <configuration>
        <skip>true</skip>
      </configuration>
    </plugin>
  </plugins>
</build

3. Ignore errors  – The following configuration will ignore all errors occurred during cleanup.

<build>
  <plugins>
    <plugin>
      <artifactId>maven-clean-plugin</artifactId>
      <version>3.1.0</version>
      <configuration>
        <failOnError>false</failOnError>
      </configuration>
    </plugin>
  <plugins>
</build>