Frequently Asked Questions

  1. When releasing from a parent POM, won't all its modules have the same release version and dev version as this parent?
  2. How can I release a parent POM without releasing all its modules?
  3. How can I hide my username and password?
  4. How can I customize the comment prefix of a commit during release preparation?
  5. Why is release:prepare failing when trying to tag with "svn: Path '...' does not exist in revision ..."
When releasing from a parent POM, won't all its modules have the same release version and dev version as this parent?

Maven Release Plugin will prompt for each project's version.

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How can I release a parent POM without releasing all its modules?

You need to pass the -N flag to Maven and configure the Release Plugin to pass the -N flag on its forked builds with the -Darguments flag.

Here's an example:

mvn -N -Darguments=-N release:prepare
mvn -N -Darguments=-N release:perform

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How can I hide my username and password?

Add a server-entry to your settings.xml, where you define your credentials (see settings.xml#servers for more details). Since you can't set an id for the scm in your pom.xml, you should add a property pointing to the server-id.


  <project>
   ...
    <properties>
      <project.scm.id>my-scm-server</project.scm.id>
    </properties>
  </project>

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How can I customize the comment prefix of a commit during release preparation?

By default the plugin will prefix the comment with [maven-release-plugin]. You can change this by adding -DscmCommentPrefix=#42 to the Maven command.

If you need to end this with a linebreak, add ${line.separator}.

If the comment prefix contains whitespace characters, surround the argument with quotes.

When using the plugin-configuration, you can't end with a space, because Plexus will trim the content. But you can end with a linebreak just like the example below:


  <configuration>
    <scmCommentPrefix>#42${line.separator}</scmCommentPrefix>
    ...
  </configuration>

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Why is release:prepare failing when trying to tag with "svn: Path '...' does not exist in revision ..."

If the pom.xml has no scm-section but inherits one from its parent, the prepare goal will fail when trying to tag. The message will be something like:

svn: Path '...' does not exist in revision ...

To fix it, roll-back the release, add the scm section to the pom.xml, commit and retry the release.

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