Maven Profile - Activate Profile depending on packaging

Question

Hi all,

I have a POM which declares web application stuff that is common to my projects. I use this as the parent for all web applications.

Is it possible to activate a profile only when the packaging is war? I have tried the property approach, but that doesn't work (as it isn't a system/environment property).

Since this fails the build, I can simply disable that profile when installing the POM, but I'd like it to be more intelligent on its own.

Walter

Answer 1

I know this isn't answering your question directly, but the usual workaround for problems like this is to just use specialization (as with classes).

So you have your MasterPom with all common behavior.

MasterWarPom that extends MasterPom (is it's parent), and put any 'packing is war' specializations in here.

Likewise you could have MasterJarPom, etc ...

That way the differences are split out nicely.

Answer 2

There's no clean way to do that, the parent module has no way of knowing the child's packaging. (Non-clean solutions would involve creating a plugin that parses the child module's pom etc.)