The Maven Source Plugin is used to create a jar archive of the source files of your project.

Goals:

• source:aggregate aggregates sources for all modules in an aggregator project.
• source:jar is used to bundle the main sources of the project into a jar archive.
• source:test-jar on the other hand, is used to bundle the test sources of the project into a jar archive.
• source:jar-no-fork is similar to jar but does not fork the build lifecycle.
• source:test-jar-no-fork is similar to test-jar but does not fork the build lifecycle.

Configuration:

<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-source-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>3.2.0</version>
            <executions>
                <execution>
                    <id>attach-sources</id>
                    <phase>verify</phase>
                    <goals>
                        <goal>jar-no-fork</goal>
                    </goals>
                </execution>
            </executions>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>

Run the following maven command to generate jar archive of project source files:

mvn install

Output:

[INFO] Installing C:\projects\HelloWorldApplication\target\HelloWorld-1.0-SNAPSHOT-sources.jar to C:\Users\Bijan\.m2\repository\com\qascript\HelloWorld\1.0-SNAPSHOT\HelloWorld-1.0-SNAPSHOT-sources.jar