How to activate a Maven Profile for a specific module in a mutli-module project

Question

We have a multi-module Maven project consisting of a parent POM and 5 or more modules.

Each module can be deployed to a running server as part of the build if we act

Answer 1

If each of your modules will have it's own "auto-deploy" profile, and profile activation will be triggered by variables passed to mvn command, you will be able to run single mvn command on parent module and decide which modules should be deployed simply by declaring activation variables

<profiles>
    <profile>
        <id>profileId</id>
        <activation>
            <property>
                <name>profileIdEnabled</name>
                <value>true</value>
            </property>
        </activation>
        <properties></properties>
    </profile>
</profiles>

and then

mvn -DprofileIdEnabled=true

Answer 2

Check out Maven: The Complete Reference - Section 6.2. Using Advanced Reactor Options.

Starting with the Maven 2.1 release, there are new Maven command line options which allow you to manipulate the way that Maven will build multimodule projects. These new options are:

-rf, --resume-from

   Resume reactor from specified project

-pl, --projects

   Build specified reactor projects instead of all projects

-am, --also-make

   If project list is specified, also build projects required by the list

-amd, --also-make-dependents

   If project list is specified, also build projects that depend on projects on the list

To build only module-b from the root directory:

$ mvn --projects module-b install