Beware of passing -P to Maven


Maven has a cool feature where you can separate different settings/build configuration bundles in what it calls profiles. To active a profile, one would pass:

$ mvn -Pdevelopment-only-settings compile

If there's a profile you want to always activate, it can itself have a setting like this:

<settings>
..
  <profiles>
    <profile>
      <id>development-only-settings</id>
      <activation>
        <activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>
      </activation>
    </profile>
  </profiles>
</settings>

Alternatively, you can activate the profile(s) you need by passing the -P parameter to Maven:

$ mvn -Pfoo compile

The thing, though, is that this will disable all the profiles you have defined with <activeByDefault/> (warning)

To be sure that a profile always is activated, even if the user (like Jenkins) passes -P to Maven, instead use:

<settings>
..
  <profiles>
    <profile>
      <id>development-only-settings</id>
    </profile>
  </profiles>
  <activeProfiles>
    <activeProfile>development</activeProfile>
  </activeProfiles>
</settings>

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