Maven is not working in Java 8 when Javadoc tags are incomplete

The best solution would be to fix the javadoc errors. If for some reason that is not possible (ie: auto generated source code) then you can disable this check.

DocLint is a new feature in Java 8, which is summarized as:

Provide a means to detect errors in Javadoc comments early in the development cycle and in a way that is easily linked back to the source code.

This is enabled by default, and will run a whole lot of checks before generating Javadocs. You need to turn this off for Java 8 as specified in this thread. You'll have to add this to your maven configuration:

<profiles>
  <profile>
    <id>java8-doclint-disabled</id>
    <activation>
      <jdk>[1.8,)</jdk>
    </activation>
    <properties>
      <javadoc.opts>-Xdoclint:none</javadoc.opts>
    </properties>
  </profile>
</profiles>
<build>
  <plugins>
    <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-javadoc-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>2.9</version>
        <executions>
            <execution>
                <id>attach-javadocs</id>
                <goals>
                    <goal>jar</goal>
                </goals>
                <configuration>
                    <additionalparam>${javadoc.opts}</additionalparam>
                </configuration>
            </execution>
        </executions>
    </plugin>
    <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-site-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>3.3</version>
        <configuration>
          <reportPlugins>
            <plugin>
              <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
              <artifactId>maven-javadoc-plugin</artifactId>
              <configuration>
                <additionalparam>${javadoc.opts}</additionalparam>
              </configuration>
            </plugin>
          </reportPlugins>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
   </plugins>
</build>

For maven-javadoc-plugin 3.0.0+: Replace

<additionalparam>-Xdoclint:none</additionalparam>

with

<doclint>none</doclint>

The easiest approach to get things working with both java 8 and java 7 is to use a profile in the build:

<profiles>
  <profile>
    <id>doclint-java8-disable</id>
    <activation>
      <jdk>[1.8,)</jdk>
    </activation>

    <build>
      <plugins>
        <plugin>
          <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
          <artifactId>maven-javadoc-plugin</artifactId>
          <configuration>
            <additionalparam>-Xdoclint:none</additionalparam>
          </configuration>
        </plugin>
      </plugins>
    </build>
  </profile>
</profiles>

Here is the most concise way I am aware of to ignore doclint warnings regardless of java version used. There is no need to duplicate plugin configuration in multiple profiles with slight modifications.

<profiles>
  <profile>
    <id>doclint-java8-disable</id>
    <activation>
      <jdk>[1.8,)</jdk>
    </activation>
    <properties>
      <javadoc.opts>-Xdoclint:none</javadoc.opts>
    </properties>
  </profile>
</profiles>

<build>
  <plugins>
    <plugin>
      <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
      <artifactId>maven-javadoc-plugin</artifactId>
      <version>2.9.1</version>
      <executions>
        <execution>
          <id>attach-javadocs</id> <!-- The actual id should be apparent from maven output -->
          <configuration>
            <additionalparam>${javadoc.opts}</additionalparam>
          </configuration>
        </execution>
      </executions>
    </plugin>
    ...
  </plugins>
</build>

Tested on oracle/open jdk 6, 7, 8 and 11.

The shortest solution that will work with any Java version:

<profiles>
    <profile>
        <id>disable-java8-doclint</id>
        <activation>
            <jdk>[1.8,)</jdk>
        </activation>
        <properties>
            <additionalparam>-Xdoclint:none</additionalparam>
        </properties>
    </profile>
</profiles>

Just add that to your POM and you're good to go.

This is basically @ankon's answer plus @zapp's answer.

For maven-javadoc-plugin 3.0.0 users:

Replace

<additionalparam>-Xdoclint:none</additionalparam>

by

<doclint>none</doclint>

Add into the global properties section in the pom file:

<project>
    ...
    <properties>
        <additionalparam>-Xdoclint:none</additionalparam>
    </properties>

The common solution provided here in the other answers (adding that property in the plugins section) did not work for some reason. Only by setting it globally I could build the javadoc jar successfully.

I don't think just turning off DocLint is a good solution, at least not long term. It is good that Javadoc has become a bit more strict so the right way to fix the build problem is to fix the underlying problem. Yes, you'll ultimately need to fix those source code files.

Here are the things to look out for that you could previously get away with:

Malformed HTML (for example a missing end-tag, un-escaped brackets, etc)

Invalid {@link }s. (same goes for similar tags such as @see)

Invalid @author values. This used to be accepted : @author John but not so anymore because of the un-escaped brackets.

HTML tables in Javadoc now require a summary or caption. See this question for explanation.

You'll simply have to fix your source code files and keep building your Javadoc until it can build without a failure. Cumbersome yes, but personally I like when I have brought my projects up to DocLint level because it means I can be more confident that the Javadoc I produce is actually what I intend.

There's of course the problem if you are generating Javadoc on some source code you've not produced yourself, for example because it comes from some code generator, e.g. wsimport. Strange that Oracle didn't prepare their own tools for JDK8 compliance before actually releasing JDK8. It seems it won't be fixed until Java 9. Only in this particular case I suggest to turn off DocLint as documented elsewhere on this page.

Overriding maven-javadoc-plugin configuration only, does not fix the problem with mvn site (used e.g during the release stage). Here's what I had to do:

<profile>
  <id>doclint-java8-disable</id>
  <activation>
    <jdk>[1.8,)</jdk>
  </activation>
  <build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-javadoc-plugin</artifactId>
        <configuration>
          <additionalparam>-Xdoclint:none</additionalparam>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-site-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>3.3</version>
        <configuration>
          <reportPlugins>
            <plugin>
              <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
              <artifactId>maven-javadoc-plugin</artifactId>
              <configuration>
                <additionalparam>-Xdoclint:none</additionalparam>
              </configuration>
            </plugin>
          </reportPlugins>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>
</profile>

You could try setting the failOnError property (see plugin documentation) to false:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-javadoc-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.9</version>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>attach-javadocs</id>
            <goals>
                <goal>jar</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
              <failOnError>false</failOnError>
            </configuration>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

As you can see from the docs, the default value is true.

Since it depends on the version of your JRE which is used to run the maven command you propably dont want to disable DocLint per default in your pom.xml

Hence, from command line you can use the switch -Dadditionalparam=-Xdoclint:none.

Example: mvn clean install -Dadditionalparam=-Xdoclint:none

The configuration property name has been changed in the latest version of maven-javadoc-plugin which is 3.0.0.

Hence the will not work. So we have to modify it as below.

   <plugin>
      <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
      <artifactId>maven-javadoc-plugin</artifactId>
      <version>3.0.0</version>
      <configuration>
         <doclint>none</doclint>
      </configuration>
  </plugin>

I would like to add some insight into other answers

In my case

-Xdoclint:none

Didn't work.

Let start with that, in my project, I didn't really need javadoc at all. Only some necessary plugins had got a build time dependency on it.

So, the most simple way solve my problem was:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-javadoc-plugin</artifactId>
    <configuration>
        <skip>true</skip>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

As of maven-javadoc-plugin 3.0.0 you should have been using additionalJOption to set an additional Javadoc option, so if you would like Javadoc to disable doclint, you should add the following property.

<properties>
    ...
    <additionalJOption>-Xdoclint:none</additionalJOption>
    ...
<properties>

You should also mention the version of maven-javadoc-plugin as 3.0.0 or higher.

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-javadoc-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>3.0.0</version>    
</plugin>

So, save yourself some hours that I didn't and try this if it seems not to work:

 <additionalJOption>-Xdoclint:none</additionalJOption>

The tag is changed for newer versions.

Added below

JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS=-DadditionalJOption=-Xdoclint:none

Into Jenkins job :

Configuration > Build Environment > Inject environment variables to the build process > Properties Content

Solved my problem of code building through Jenkins Maven :-)

I'm not sure if this is going to help, but even i faced the exact same problem very recently with oozie-4.2.0 version. After reading through the above answers i have just added the maven option through command line and it worked for me. So, just sharing here.

I'm using java 1.8.0_77, haven't tried with java 1.7

bin/mkdistro.sh -DskipTests -Dmaven.javadoc.opts='-Xdoclint:-html'

To ignore missing @param and @return tags, it's enough to disable the missing doclint group. This way, the javadoc will still be checked for higher level and syntax issues:

    <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-javadoc-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>3.0.0</version>
        <configuration>
            <doclint>all,-missing</doclint>
        </configuration>
    </plugin>

Note that this is for plugin version 3.0 or newer.

I'm a bit late to the party, but I was forced to search for workaround too, ended up here, and then found it.

Here's what works for me:-

export JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS=-DadditionalJOption=-Xdoclint:none

And then start your Maven build, any Linux distribution build etc. Nice thing about it that it doesn't require Maven config files modification - I couldn't do that as my objective was to rebuild a bunch of Centos rpm packages, so had to go really deep.

In my case I was using a parent pom (not sure it was the real cause since I was running against the clock), maven 2.x and java 1.6 were used, for some reason above solutions didn't work, so I added the following profile and managed it to make it run:

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd">
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
    <groupId>com.mycompany</groupId>
    <artifactId>myapp</artifactId>
    <packaging>war</packaging>
    <name>myapp</name>
    <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
    <description>My App</description>
    <parent>
        <groupId>com.mycompany</groupId>
        <artifactId>parent-artifact</artifactId>
        <version>0.0.1</version>
    </parent>

    <profiles>
        <profile>
            <id>doclint-java6-disable</id>
            <activation>
                <jdk>[1.6,)</jdk>
            </activation>
            <properties>
                <additionalparam>--allow-script-in-comments</additionalparam>
            </properties>
        </profile>
    </profiles>
</project>