Take this and save it as pom.xml in your project directory.

pom.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<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/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>

    <groupId>com.example</groupId>
    <artifactId>my-project</artifactId>
    <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>

    <dependencies>
        <!-- none yet -->
    </dependencies>
    
    <properties>
        <!-- use UTF-8 for everything -->
        <project.build.sourceEncoding>UTF-8</project.build.sourceEncoding>
        <project.reporting.outputEncoding>UTF-8</project.reporting.outputEncoding>
    </properties>
    
    <build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
                <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
                <version>3.1</version>
                <!-- compile for Java 1.7 -->
                <configuration>
                    <source>1.7</source>
                    <target>1.7</target>
                    <encoding>UTF-8</encoding>
                </configuration>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>
</project>

Nice. Is there a way we can pass things like groupId, artifactId as arguments and make it even more generic? Java source and target versions can be made generic too.

This is maybe a dumb question, but if I want to use java-8 can I just bump the version in the configuration block to 1.8?

@estsauver
Yes, but keep in mind that by targeting Java 8, others who may wish to run your compiler output but only have version 1.7 of the JDK installed will not be able to do so without recompilation.