By default Maven Release Plugin will prompt for each project's version. However, you can set the autoVersionSubmodules parameter to true to automatically use the parent version.

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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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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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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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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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Yes, you can use any other plugin for deployment. There is no strong interconnection between the Maven Release Plugin and the Maven Deploy Plugin. The Maven Release Plugin simply runs the deploy Maven goal during release (or any other goals you specified). This allows you for example to use the central-publishing-maven-plugin when deploying to Maven Central.

However, it might be necessary to configure the Maven Deploy Plugin to skip execution because the plugin is automatically configured by default (note that some custom deploy plugins automatically disable the Maven Deploy Plugin):

  <build>
    <pluginManagement>
      <plugins>
        <!-- Skip execution of Maven Deploy Plugin due to usage of custom deploy plugin -->
        <plugin>
          <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
          <artifactId>maven-deploy-plugin</artifactId>
          <version>...</version>
          <configuration>
            <skip>true</skip>
          </configuration>
        </plugin>
      </plugins>
    </pluginManagement>
  </build>

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