Values for os.family in Maven profile activation condition

Question

Maven allows to activate certain build profiles based on the operating system family it runs on, for example:

<profile>
    <activation>
        <os><family>Windows</family></os>
    </activation>
</profile>

There is a number of question around this: what are allowed values for os.family then? Are they case sensitive? Does Linux come across as Unix? Or unix? And so on.

Where can I find information about allowed values – or, at least, where does Maven take these values from? Environment variables?

Answer 1

The values are defined in the plexus-utils project, in Os.java. You can see in isOs that the match is case-insensitive, that the value is taken from System.getProperty( "os.name" ) and that you should specify unix to match a Linux platform.

Answer 2

OS family values:

dos
mac
netware
os/2
tandem
unix
windows
win9x
z/os
os/400
openvms

Other value you can get by run simple program:

public class SystemProperties {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Os name: " + System.getProperty("os.name"));
        System.out.println("Os arch: " + System.getProperty("os.arch"));
        System.out.println("Os version: " + System.getProperty("os.version"));
    }
}

Answer 3

A very useful Maven command for checking these OS properties on your machine:

mvn enforcer:display-info

Example output on a SunOS / Sparc host:

[INFO] Maven Version: 3.0.4
[INFO] JDK Version: 1.6.0_34 normalized as: 1.6.0-34
[INFO] OS Info: Arch: sparc Family: unix Name: sunos Version: 5.8

Example output on a Linux host:

[INFO] Maven Version: 3.0.4
[INFO] JDK Version: 1.7.0_85 normalized as: 1.7.0-85
[INFO] OS Info: Arch: amd64 Family: unix Name: linux Version: 2.6.32-504.23.4.el6.x86_64

Answer 4

it might worth asking from maven help:

mvn help:system | grep "os\."