What is a Maven artifact?

What is an artifact and why does Maven need it?

An artifact is a file, usually a JAR, that gets deployed to a Maven repository.

A Maven build produces one or more artifacts, such as a compiled JAR and a "sources" JAR.

Each artifact has a group ID (usually a reversed domain name, like com.example.foo), an artifact ID (just a name), and a version string. The three together uniquely identify the artifact.

A project's dependencies are specified as artifacts.

In general software terms, an "artifact" is something produced by the software development process, whether it be software related documentation or an executable file.

In Maven terminology, the artifact is the resulting output of the maven build, generally a jar or war or other executable file. Artifacts in maven are identified by a coordinate system of groupId, artifactId, and version. Maven uses the groupId, artifactId, and version to identify dependencies (usually other jar files) needed to build and run your code.