Maven Profiles — Different Configurations for Different Environments

Development, test and production environments often need different configurations (database addresses, log levels, and so on). Maven’s Profile mechanism was designed to solve exactly this problem.

Defining a Profile

In pom.xml:

<profiles>
    <profile>
        <id>dev</id>
        <properties>
            <env.name>development</env.name>
            <db.url>jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/dev_db</db.url>
        </properties>
        <activation>
            <activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>
        </activation>
    </profile>

    <profile>
        <id>prod</id>
        <properties>
            <env.name>production</env.name>
            <db.url>jdbc:mysql://prod-server:3306/prod_db</db.url>
        </properties>
    </profile>
</profiles>

Activating a Profile

# Activate a single one
mvn package -Pdev
mvn package -Pprod

# Activate several
mvn package -Pdev,debug

# Exclude one (when prod has activeByDefault)
mvn package -P!prod

Using it together with resource filtering

In src/main/resources/application.properties:

env.name=${env.name}
db.url=${db.url}

Then enable filtering in the <build> section of pom.xml:

<resources>
    <resource>
        <directory>src/main/resources</directory>
        <filtering>true</filtering>
    </resource>
</resources>

At packaging time Maven replaces ${env.name} with the value from the corresponding Profile.

Automatic activation by condition

<!-- Triggered by JDK version -->
<activation>
    <jdk>[11,)</jdk>
</activation>

<!-- Triggered by operating system -->
<activation>
    <os>
        <name>Windows 10</name>
        <family>windows</family>
    </os>
</activation>

<!-- Triggered by presence of a property -->
<activation>
    <property>
        <name>ci</name>
    </property>
</activation>

Defining a global Profile in settings.xml

~/.m2/settings.xml (shared by all projects):

<profiles>
    <profile>
        <id>company-repo</id>
        <repositories>
            <repository>
                <id>internal</id>
                <url>https://nexus.company.com/repository/maven-public/</url>
            </repository>
        </repositories>
    </profile>
</profiles>

<activeProfiles>
    <activeProfile>company-repo</activeProfile>
</activeProfiles>

Overriding dependencies in a Profile

<profile>
    <id>local</id>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.example</groupId>
            <artifactId>mock-service</artifactId>
            <version>1.0</version>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
</profile>

For local development use a mock implementation, and for production use the real implementation.

Viewing the currently active Profile

mvn help:active-profiles

A small step forward every day is a new height!