I have the following Maven organization:
- ./pom.xml (top-level project, which defines the 4 modules below)
- ./a/pom.xml (jar)
- ./b/pom.xml (jar)
- ./c/pom.xml (war)
- ./d/pom.xml (war)
So far, I have been using Maven as following (all executed in the root):
1. mvn clean compile install
2. mvn tomcat7:redeploy -pl c
3. mvn tomcat7:redeploy -pl d
Although this works perfectly, I am not really sure if this is the preferred way. In the first step, I am installing all projects, but actually, only the jar projects a and b should be installed. There is no need to install the c and d projects.
Although it doesn't hurt installing c and d, is there a better usage of Maven to avoid this? I can always manually install a and b, but this ofcourse conterfeits the benefits of modules (auto-detection of dependency order, to name one benefit).
compile and install are both part of the default lifecycle, so there's no need to call compile. And you don't need to install files in case dependencies are part of the reactor (i.e. all the maven projects being built). Instead package is good enough, although I prefer verify in case there are integration-tests.
You could probably do this as well: mvn verify tomcat7:redeploy -pl c -am, where -am triggers projects of the multimodule project which are required to build c.