What is an artifact in Maven and why does Maven need it? - Maven Tutorial
In general software terms, an “artifact” is something produced by the software development process, whether it be software related documentation or an executable file.
That could be a .jar file, or a .war file, or a .zip file, or a .dll, or whatever have you.
I will give some more examples:
it could be use cases, class diagrams, and other Unified Modeling Language (UML) models, requirements and design documents.
But in maven, ARTIFACT is a JAR,(WAR or EAR), but it could be also something else. Each artifact has
1). a group ID (like com.your.package),2). an artifact ID (just a name), and3). a version string.
The three together uniquely identify the artifact.
Q.Why Maven need Artifact?
Ans: Maven is used to make them available for your application
In Maven, the build process is arranged as a set of artifacts. Artifacts include:
1. The plugins that makeup Maven itself.2. Dependencies that your code depends on.3. Anything that your build produces that can, in turn, be consumed by something else.
Artifacts live in repositories.