maven.tar.gz

Maven is the de-facto build tool of choice for Java projects and has wide adoption at the enterprise level.

In this course, you will learn the fundamentals of Maven so that you can start to inject build automation into your own projects. You’ll start by exploring the basics such as plugins, goals, coordinates, and lifecycles.

In the latter half, you will dive into more advanced concepts such as dependencies, inheritance, aggregation, and build profiles. 

By the end of this course, you will have just the right amount of knowledge for you to quickly become productive when working with Maven.

Build Java Projects with Maven

The notion of a _profile_ when building Maven projects stems from the need for **build portability**. _The ease with which a particular project can be built for different environments is referred to as build portability_. For example, if you are working on a project on your local machine, can another developer easily clone your project on their machine and build it successfully? If your project has dependencies only found on your machine, other developers will not be able to build your project and the project will not be considered portable. Build portability isn't a binary attribute, rather it spans a spectrum as shown below:

A build can be **non-portable**, that is the project can only be built under specific circumstances and criteria. A build can be **portable across environments**, that is the project can be built in test, stage, or production environments. A project build may be **portable within an organization**, e.g., dependencies are only available within the organization's local repository. Finally, a build can be **universally portable**, i.e., anyone can download the source code for such a project and build it.

The concept of a profile allows Maven to use an alternative set of configuration values that set or override default values. Using profiles, we can customize a build for different environments. For instance, the database to connect to may have a different name in test vs production.

Let's consider an example, say we want to execute a script `test.sh` in the test environment and a script `prod.sh` in the production environment. We can achieve this using profiles. The POM file for the project is shown below:


This lesson explains the concept of build profiles in Maven that can be used to customize a build for a targeted environment such as production or test.

Theory

Build Profiles