Maven: The Definitive Guide

Portability Through Maven Profiles

A profile in Maven is an alternative set of configuration values that set or override default values. Using a profile, you can customize a build for different environments. Profiles are configured in the pom.xml and are given an identifier. Then you can run Maven with a command-line flag that tells Maven to execute goals in a specific profile. The pom.xml shown in Example 11-1 uses a production profile to override the default settings of the Compiler plugin.

Example 11-1. Using a Maven profile to override production compiler settings

<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>org.sonatype.mavenbook</groupId>
  <artifactId>simple</artifactId>
  <packaging>jar</packaging>
  <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
  <name>simple</name>
  <url>http://maven.apache.org</url>
  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>junit</groupId>
      <artifactId>junit</artifactId>
      <version>3.8.1</version>
      <scope>test</scope>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
  <profiles>
    <profile>
      <id>production</id>
      <build> <plugins> <plugin> <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId> <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId> ...