Helikopterparent

Evolved from a project to just verify builds.

Can be used as a parent pom providing utils and presets for builds.

Features

• writes the effective pom into target (inherited)
• lists the active profiles in the maven output (inherited)
• provides manage-updates profile to update dependencies and plugins to reasonable versions, i.e. not alpha, beta, rc etc.pp. (inherited)
• has all the settings for maven central publishing in a profile (inherited)
• signs builds for maven central by profile activation (inherited)
• has maven enforcer set up (inherited)
• archives git info in packages (inherited)
• has maven-git-versioning-extension set up to release by just tagging a version (showcase, not inherited, see .mvn/ directory)

Usage

Set this as your parent. Version control your project (or set -DgenerateBackupPoms=true).

Which version updates are considered reasonable is defined in version-rules.xml which must be copied or linked to your .m2 directory.

Keep all versions in properties, as this uses the upate-properties goal of the versions plugin and that approach keeps all work in one go. mvn -Pmanage-updates versions:upate-properties then updates them all and you can take or ditch them with e.g. git commands.

GPG signing can be skipped with -Dskip-maven-gpg-plugin=true

Maintenance

After facing issues with a local m2 repo that insisted on being up-to-date, updating versions herein is probably best done with an empty repo. There is a setting in .mvn/maven.config just do something like rm -rf .m2 && mvn -Pmanage-updates versions:update-properties.

other useful commands

Get the full list of profiles mvn help:all-profiles, enable all of them as far as possible, so all the calls show the full info.

Resolve plugins to check for some deps of plugins, too. But I am unsure if this will definitely give all transitive dependencies, too:

mvn -Pmanage-updates,analyze,rewrite dependency:resolve-plugins

If in doubt, watch the m2 directory. By that I could verify that there is no plugin dependency of commons-collections prior to 3.2.2 from the plugins, as that shows what was actually downloaded to run any plugin.