Maven: activating a default profile, with a twist

[Dave Alvarado]

Hi,

I'm using Maven 3.0.3. I have defined a number of profiles with id's dev, qa, prod, jetty, and tomcat. If neither of dev, qa, or prod is entered, I would like the "dev" profile to be active. How do I configure this?

Thanks, - Dave

[Tim Holloway]

So what's the twist? You can specify the default profile in the POM. I've done it myself for projects where the production machine was significantly different from the development machine that different dependencies were required.

[Dave Alvarado]

The twist is if someone specifies either the "jetty" or "tomcat" profiles, without specifying "dev", "qa", or "prod", I want the "dev" profile to also be activated. So, running

   mvn -P tomcat tomcat:run

should also force the "dev" profile to be active. How do I make that happen? This won't work with the above example ...

  <profile>
    <id>dev</id>
    <activation>
      <activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>
    </activation>

[Tim Holloway]

OK. I should mention that my webapps are normally designed to use the same build for dev, test and production; I do the environment-specific stuff in the deployment, not in the app itself. Not only does this make my deployables one-size-fits-all, it also ensures that the code being tested is the same code that broke in production. I only use profiles when the differences are too radical for that, such as development on Tomcat for deployment on JBoss (which, unlike Tomcat has JSF built in and doesn't need the extra jars).

There are 3 possibilities that I know of.

1. Activate the tomcat profile as a default too. Since you can have more than one profile applied to a build.

2. Duplicate the desired profile elements in the default profile

3. Put it all under a super-POM that recurses on Maven with the desired profiles.

[Dave Alvarado]

I tried your second suggestion by adding

                        <activation>
                                <property>
                                        <name>env</name>
                                        <value>dev</value>
                                </property>
                        </activation>

but it seems I have bigger problems. I thought the above means that "env" is now a variable I can use in my script. But when I run

mvn clean -P qa package

it dies with the error ...

[ERROR] Failed to execute goal org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-antrun-plugin:1.3:run (default) on project LeadsMonitor: An Ant BuildException has occured: Warning: Could not find file /Users/davea/Documents/workspace-sts-2.6.0.SR1/NNA/Technology/nna/tools/leadsmonitor/src/main/resources/${env}_environment.properties to copy. -> [Help 1]

Here is the maven code I'm using to copy environment specific properties ...

                        <plugin>
                                <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
                                <executions>
                                        <execution>
                                                <phase>prepare-package</phase>
                                                <goals>
                                                        <goal>run</goal>
                                                </goals>
                                                <configuration>
                                                        <tasks>
                                                                <delete file="${project.build.outputDirectory}/environment.properties"/>
                                                                <copy file="src/main/resources/${env}_environment.properties"
                                                                                tofile="${project.build.outputDirectory}/environment.properties" />
                                                                <delete file="${project.build.outputDirectory}/${env}_hibernate.cfg.xml"/>
                                                                <copy file="src/main/resources/${env}_hibernate.cfg.xml"
                                                                                tofile="${project.build.outputDirectory}/hibernate.cfg.xml" />
                                                        </tasks>
                                                </configuration>
                                        </execution>
                                </executions>
                        </plugin>