Maven: A Developer's Notebook

Announcing a Project Release

You have deployed your artifacts to a Maven remote repository. Now you need to announce this fact to your project stakeholders.

How do I do that?

Use the Announcement plug-in. If you've been following the practice of using a changes.xml file to describe your project changes, as demonstrated earlier, this will be very easy. If not, you're out of luck, as the Announcement plug-in works hand in hand with the Changes plug-in.

In this lab you'll generate a release announcement for the qotd/core subproject, which will allow you to reuse the changes.xml file you added in a previous lab.

Decide for what release you want to generate the announcement. If you don't configure anything, an announcement for the current version defined in the POM will be generated. You can control this through the maven.announcement.version property, which defaults to:

maven.announcement.version = ${pom.currentVersion}

The Announcement plug-in makes one check: it verifies that there is a version tag in the POM that matches the release for which you wish to generate the announcement. A version tag indicates that a release has been made, and it's also meant to link the release with the SCM tag that you've used. It's indeed good practice to tag your SCM when performing a software release. Let's imagine that you've already released version 0.9 of the core project. Add the following version information to qotd/core/project.xml:

[...]
  </repository>
  
  <versions>
               <version>
               <id>0.9</id>
               <name>0.9</name> ...