Goals Overview

The Reactor plugin has several goals:

• reactor:resume resumes a reactor at a certain point (e.g. when it fails in the middle)

  Example: mvn reactor:resume -Dfrom=bar

• reactor:make builds a project X and all of the reactor projects on which X depends

  Example: mvn reactor:make -Dmake.folders=foo,bar

• reactor:make-dependents builds a project X and all of the reactor projects that depend on X (the reverse of reactor:make)

  Example: mvn reactor:make-dependents -Dmake.folders=foo,bar

• reactor:make-scm-changes build all reactor projects that you personally have changed (according to SCM) and all reactor projects that depend on your changes

  Example: mvn reactor:make-scm-changes

make vs. make-dependents

The goals reactor:make and reactor:make-dependents are very similar. They differ in the direction of dependency analysis.

For example, suppose project "fooUI" depends on project "barBusinessLogic", which depends on project "bazDataAccess".

fooUI --> barBusinessLogic --> bazDataAccess

Ordinarily, when building, you'll first build bazDataAccess, then barBusinessLogic, then fooUI.

• make: In order to "make" barBusinessLogic, you first have to build bazDataAccess. So if you run reactor:make on barBusinessLogic, it will build bazDataAccess, and then build barBusinessLogic; it won't build fooUI. (This should remind you of the traditional "make" tool.)

  barBusinessLogic --> bazDataAccess
  

• make-dependents: Because fooUI depends on barBusinessLogic, fooUI is a "dependent" project of barBusinessLogic. Anything that depends on barBusinessLogic is one of barBusinessLogic's "dependents." Hence, reactor:make-dependents will build barBusinessLogic, and then build fooUI.

  fooUI --> barBusinessLogic
  

In other words, reactor:make walks *down* the dependency tree, whereas reactor:make-dependents walks *up* the dependency tree.

Examples

To provide you with better understanding on some usages of the Reactor Plugin, you can take a look at the examples page.