Let’s see how profiles could help in Maven build?

Taking the following code snippet as my use case:

 ${project.name}
     
 
  
   org.apache.tomcat.maven
   tomcat7-maven-plugin
   ...
   ...
  

  
   org.apache.maven.plugins
   maven-compiler-plugin
   ...
   ...
  

  
   org.apache.maven.plugins
   maven-war-plugin
   ...
   ...
  
 

In most situation, I will just run mvn clean install tomcat7:run to bring up my application instance. But somehow, in some situation, I would like to have some special configuration on the WAR packaging to be different from the regular build. For example, to exclude some particular JAR out from the build during packaging stage, if I'm using the regular configuration as shown in the code snippet above, I will hit error when I bring up my application instance due to some libraries were gone missing during packaging stage.

In order to play well on both mvn clean install tomcat7:run and mvn clean package, my colleague suggest me to use profiles for this situation. As shown in the following code snippet, another piece of maven-war-plugins configuration is created inside the <profile>:

 
    
       CUSTOM
       
         
            
               org.apache.maven.plugins
               maven-war-plugin
               2.2
               
                  %regex[WEB-INF/lib/(?!mycustomlibrary).*.jar]
               
            
         
         myfinalName
       
    
 

With this new configuration, the regular build process will continue to work as expected while I have another separate piece to build a custom made build process for packaging. But separated piece need to be done with following command:

mvn clean package –PCUSTOM

Do take note on the <finalName> usage, it allows me to specify a custom package output file name that is different from the regular ugly Maven style name.