continuous integration - Skip a submodule during a Maven build

Question

We have a need to be able to skip a submodule in certain environments.

The module in question contains integration tests and takes half an hour to run. So we want to include it when building on the CI server, but when developers build locally (and tests get run), we want to skip that module.

Is there a way to do this with a profile setting? I've done some googling and looked at the other questions/answers here and haven't found a good solution.

I suppose one option is to remove that submodule from the parent pom.xml entirely, and just add another project on our CI server to just build that module.

Suggestions?

Answer 1

Maven version 3.2.1 added this feature, you can use the -pl switch (shortcut for --projects list) with ! or - (source) to exclude certain submodules.

mvn -pl '!submodule-to-exclude' install
mvn -pl -submodule-to-exclude install

Be careful in bash the character ! is a special character, so you either have to single quote it (like I did) or escape it with the backslash character.

The syntax to exclude multiple module is the same as the inclusion

mvn -pl '!submodule1,!submodule2' install
mvn -pl -submodule1,-submodule2 install

EDIT Windows does not seem to like the single quotes, but it is necessary in bash ; in Windows, use double quotes (thanks @awilkinson)

mvn -pl "!submodule1,!submodule2" install