Prepare a Release
Preparing a release goes through the following release phases by default:
- Check that there are no uncommitted changes in the sources
- Check that there are no SNAPSHOT dependencies
- Change the version in the POMs from x-SNAPSHOT to a new version (you will be prompted for the versions to use)
- Transform the SCM information in the POM to include the final destination of the tag
- Run the project tests (preparation goals) against the modified POMs to confirm everything is in working order
- Commit the modified POMs
- Tag the code in the SCM with a version name (this will be prompted for)
- Bump the version in the POMs to a new value y-SNAPSHOT (these values will also be prompted for)
- Eventually run completion goal(s) against the project (since 2.2)
- Commit the modified POMs
To prepare a release execute this command:
mvn release:prepare
Note: If an error occurs, or the process is cancelled, then running this command again will pick up from where the last one left off.
If you wish to start again, use:
mvn release:prepare -Dresume=false
Alternatively, you can use:
mvn release:clean release:prepare
Note: If any changes have been made to your source files they might need to be reverted before you restart the prepare process. You can use release:rollback
to make the plugin do it for you.
Multi-module projects
You will be prompted for the version number for each module of the project. If you prefer that every module gets the same version as the parent POM, you can set the option autoVersionSubmodules
to true
. Now you will be asked only once for the release version and the next development version.
Generating release POMs
It is possible to generate a release-pom.xml
file for each project that contains the fully resolved project used at release time as a record for later. As of the 2.0 release, this requires calling an alternate goal:
mvn release:prepare-with-pom
This goal is equivalent to the release:prepare
goal, except that it requires a previous build of the project to exist to properly populate the release-pom.xml
files.
Overriding the default tag name format
By default, if you do not specify a tag name, a default tag name of artifactId-version
will be suggested (and used if running non-interactively).
You can override proposed value with the exact tag name to use from the command line by passing the tag
property (-Dtag=my-tag
). If you want to have the tag name generated, but just change the default pattern, you can use the tagNameFormat
configuration option.
For example to have the tag name default to the version number prefixed with a v
you could configure your pom like so:
<project> [...] <build> [...] <plugins> [...] <plugin> <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId> <artifactId>maven-release-plugin</artifactId> <version>3.0.0-M6</version> <configuration> <tagNameFormat>v@{project.version}</tagNameFormat> </configuration> </plugin> [...] </plugins> [...] </build> [...] </project>
The tagNameFormat uses @{
and }
as delimiters in order to ensure that the default Maven property interpolation does not substitute the values before the version transformation has taken place.
The following properties are supported:
project.groupId
which corresponds to the project's groupId.project.artifactId
which corresponds to the project's artifactId.project.version
which corresponds to the project's release version.
The project.
prefix is optional and may be omitted.