Maven profiles and install

Question

If I have Maven builds set up for an app with profiles set up for different environments (say like prod vs. dev, defining different DB settings and stuff like that) the 'install' goal doesn't seem to make sense, as I don't know which environment got installed into my repo - I've just got com.example.myproject:myapp:0.0.1.

Have I misunderstood something, or are profiles supposed to be used with other goals?

Solution

Well, you could use the classifier attribute so that each profile creates a jar with the classifier, i.e. a unique jar for each environment. Here is a code snippet to illustrate this. When run with the dev profile (mvn -P dev install), it creates a jar with -dev classifier, like myapp-dev-0.0.1.jar

<project>
...
    <properties>
        <env></env>
    </properties>
...

    <build>
        <plugins>
            ...
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
                <artifactId>maven-jar-plugin</artifactId>
                <configuration>
                    <classifier>${env}</classifier>
                </configuration>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>


    <profiles>
        ...
        <profile>
            <id>dev</id>
            <properties>
                <env>dev</env>
            </properties>
            ...
        </profile>
    </profiles>

</project>