Maven Building Different Environments

Supposedly you have created a web project that you need to upload to your test server from time to time. Since you’re working on your local machine, the environment on your machine is different like the password in your database, the file paths and more. With using maven, you don’t need to edit your configuration files whenever you’re building for a different environments. You can just define a new profile in your pom.xml and use that profile when building.

In this tutorial, we will be creating a webapp project which uses maven as its build tool and create two different profiles: one for our daily coding which we will name dev and another one which we’ll be calling test-server that we’ll be used when building for our test server.

How to use Maven Profiles for Building Different Environments

These assumes that you have already know how to create a webapp project in maven, otherwise you can visit the following link:

How to Create Web Application using Maven and Netbeans

Creating Web Application using Maven in IntelliJ

In this example, we want to change the configuration for our database password since the password in test server is different from our local machine.

1. Create New Configurations for Test Environment

   Create a new property file in your resources folder that contains our test server configurations eg. if you have application.properties, create a new file application.test.properties.
   application.properties

   jdbc.driverClassName = com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
   jdbc.url = jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/example
   jdbc.username = root
   jdbc.password = root
   hibernate.dialect = org.hibernate.dialect.MySQLDialect
   hibernate.show_sql = false
   hibernate.format_sql = false
   

   application.test.properties

   jdbc.driverClassName = com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
   jdbc.url = jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/example
   jdbc.username = root
   jdbc.password = Ghrsa912#
   hibernate.dialect = org.hibernate.dialect.MySQLDialect
   hibernate.show_sql = false
   hibernate.format_sql = false
   

2. Configuring Profiles in pom.xml

   Next we edit our pom.xml add our profiles.
   We also add the jetty maven plugin in our dev profile since its only used in our local not in our test server.
   pom.xml

       
           
           
               dev
               
                   
                       
                           <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
                           <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
                           3.0
                           
                               
                                   compile
                               
                           
                           
                               ${jdk.version}
                               ${jdk.version}
                           
                       
                       
                           <groupId>org.eclipse.jetty</groupId>
                           <artifactId>jetty-maven-plugin</artifactId>
                           9.3.8.v20160314
                           
                               <scanIntervalSeconds>10</scanIntervalSeconds>
                           
                       
                   
               
           
   
           
           
               test-site
               
                   <finalName>profile-example</finalName>
                   
                       
                           <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
                           <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
                           1.8
                           
                               
                                   compile
                                   
                                       run
                                   
                                   
                                       
                                           <delete file="${project.build.outputDirectory}/application.properties"/>
                                           <copy file="src/main/resources/application.test.properties"
                                                 tofile="${project.build.outputDirectory}/application.properties"/>
   
                                           <delete file="${project.build.outputDirectory}/application.test.properties"/>
                                       
                                   
                               
                           
                       
                       
                           <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
                           <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
                           3.0
                           
                               
                                   compile
                               
                           
                           
                               ${jdk.version}
                               ${jdk.version}
                           
                       
                       
                           <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
                           <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
                           2.6
                           
                               
                                   install
                               
                           
                       
                   
               
           
       
   

   Take note of the tasks inside the test-server profile. First we delete our application.properties in our build directory, then we copy application.test.properties to application.properties so that our new property file will consist the configs for our test server and lastly, we delete the application.test.properties to avoid confusion.
   

3. Building the project

   If you are using Intellij, you can simply switch in different profile by just ticking the checkbox in Maven Projects Tab.

   

   maven profiles in intellij

   
   and in Lifecycle, double click install to create the war file. Or if you don’t use Intellij, in cmd you can just run:

   mvn -Ptest-server install
   

   where test-server is the profile.

4. Verifying

   Finally, to check if it correctly build the project, go to target/classes folder and open the application.properties and check if the configurations are correct. As simple as that, just create new profiles in maven when building different environments.