How to remove/update maven project

Question

New to Maven.

Ok so I used Maven to package up my project, but one of the files had some test information in it. I would like to change that file but I'm at a standstill as keeping the same version number of the project.

I don't know what to do! Are these my options and what's the best way to do this?

1. Change the file and do a new build of the project which would increment the build by one.
   • Example: Build is at 2.0, it would move to 2.0.1 or 2.1
2. Remove the project from Maven and do a rebuild of the last project but with the new changes.
   • This is what I want to do but don't know how to remove the project from Maven and reset everything to do a rebuild
3. Open to suggestions???

Thanks

Answer 1

What exactly do you mean by "remove a project from Maven"? You mean from a public Maven repository?

You should probably bump up the version, as most projects do, when there's an "oops" moment like that. The release notes would ideally state why there's been a new version. Ideally a public notice as well.

Otherwise, you risk people getting the wrong version, or something that they have the fixed version, or whatever. For example, I use the Maven offline option (i.e., -o) pretty regularly so I don't grab the latest snapshots.

Answer 2

I used Maven to package up my project, but one of the files had some test information in it. I would like to change that file but I'm at a standstill as keeping the same version number of the project.

Maven never re-downloads released artifacts with a fixed version (as opposed to a SNAPSHOT version) once they have been downloaded (unless you delete an artifact from your local repository of course but you obviously can't rely on that). This is the only way to guarantee reproducibility (if I rebuild later, I get the same behavior). And in the same spirit, you actually can't re-release an artifact with a fixed version. This is the only way to guarantee consistency (everybody gets the same stuff).

So you'll have to change the version if you want to re-release your project.

Note that if your project is under active development, you should use a SNAPSHOT version. Here is what the Maven: Definitive guide writes about them:

3.3.1.2. SNAPSHOT Versions

Maven versions can contain a string literal to signify that a project is currently under active development. If a version contains the string “SNAPSHOT,” then Maven will expand this token to a date and time value converted to UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) when you install or release this component. For example, if your project has a version of “1.0-SNAPSHOT” and you deploy this project’s artifacts to a Maven repository, Maven would expand this version to “1.0-20080207-230803-1” if you were to deploy a release at 11:08 PM on February 7th, 2008 UTC. In other words, when you deploy a snapshot, you are not making a release of a software component; you are releasing a snapshot of a component at a specific time.

Why would you use this? SNAPSHOT versions are used for projects under active development. If your project depends on a software component that is under active development, you can depend on a SNAPSHOT release, and Maven will periodically attempt to download the latest snapshot from a repository when you run a build. Similarly, if the next release of your system is going to have a version "1.4", your project would have a version "1.4-SNAPSHOT" until it was formally released.

As a default setting, Maven will not check for SNAPSHOT releases on remote repositories. To depend on SNAPSHOT releases, users must explicitly enable the ability to download snapshots using a repository or pluginRepository element in the POM.

When releasing a project, you should resolve all dependencies on SNAPSHOT versions to dependencies on released versions. If a project depends on a SNAPSHOT, it is not stable as the dependencies may change over time. Artifacts published to non-snapshot Maven repositories such as http://repo1.maven.org/maven2 cannot depend on SNAPSHOT versions, as Maven's Super POM has snapshot's disabled from the Central repository. SNAPSHOT versions are for development only.