Post#82.Maven Build Profiles and Plugins

Maven Build Profiles

Maven build profiles enable you to build your project using different configurations. Instead of creating two separate POM files, you can just specify a profile with the different build configuration, and build your project with this build profile when needed.

Maven build profiles are specified inside the POM file, inside the profiles element. Each build profile is nested inside a profile element. Here is an example:

<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.igt.crawler</groupId>

  <artifactId>java-web-crawler</artifactId>

  <version>1.0.0</version>

  <profiles>

      <profile>

          <id>test</id>

          <activation>...</activation>

          <build>...</build>

          <modules>...</modules>

          <repositories>...</repositories>

          <pluginRepositories>...</pluginRepositories>

          <dependencies>...</dependencies>

          <reporting>...</reporting>

          <dependencyManagement>...</dependencyManagement>

          <distributionManagement>...</distributionManagement>

      </profile>

  </profiles>

</project>

The elements inside the profile element will override the values of the elements with the same name further up in the POM.

Inside the profile element you can see an activation element. This element describes the condition that triggers this build profile to be used. One way to choose what profile is being executed is in the settings.xml file. There you can set the active profile. Another way is to add -P profile-name to the Maven command line. 

Maven Plugins

Maven plugins enable you to add your own actions to the build process. You do so by creating a simple Java class that extends a special Maven class, and then create a POM for the project. The plugin should be located in its own project.