Maven antrun plugin error

November 27, 2020

Errors of the same type look like this:

Element target is not allowed here
Cannot resolve symbol copy
Cannot resolve symbol fileset
Cannot resolve symbol copydir

Most likely this means that you have included the plugin in the pom.xml like this:

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
  <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
  <executions>
    <execution>
      <id>copy-artifacts</id>
      <phase>package</phase>
      <goals>
        <goal>run</goal>
      </goals>
      <configuration>
        <target name="target_copy">
          ...
        </target>
      </configuration>
    </execution>
  </executions>
</plugin>

The reason for the error is that the plugin version is not specified. Let’s specify, for example, 1.8:

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
  <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>1.8</version>
    <executions>
        ...
    </executions>
</plugin>

After that, you need to load changes from pom.xml to Maven and the error will disappear.