Apache Maven Reactor Plugin (RETIRED)

THIS PLUGIN IS RETIRED. IT IS NO LONGER MAINTAINED.
THIS PLUGIN IS RETIRED. IT IS NO LONGER MAINTAINED.
THIS PLUGIN IS RETIRED. IT IS NO LONGER MAINTAINED.
THIS PLUGIN IS RETIRED. IT IS NO LONGER MAINTAINED.

This plugin can build a subset of interdependent projects in a reactor. It should be useful in large reactor builds that include irrelevant stuff you're not working on.

Goals Overview

The Reactor plugin has several goals:

  • reactor:resume resumes a reactor at a certain point (e.g. when it fails in the middle)

    Example: mvn reactor:resume -Dfrom=bar

  • reactor:make builds a project X and all of the reactor projects on which X depends

    Example: mvn reactor:make -Dmake.folders=foo,bar

  • reactor:make-dependents builds a project X and all of the reactor projects that depend on X (the reverse of reactor:make)

    Example: mvn reactor:make-dependents -Dmake.folders=foo,bar

  • reactor:make-scm-changes build all reactor projects that you personally have changed (according to SCM) and all reactor projects that depend on your changes

    Example: mvn reactor:make-scm-changes

make vs. make-dependents

The goals reactor:make and reactor:make-dependents are very similar. They differ in the direction of dependency analysis.

For example, suppose project "fooUI" depends on project "barBusinessLogic", which depends on project "bazDataAccess".

fooUI --> barBusinessLogic --> bazDataAccess

Ordinarily, when building, you'll first build bazDataAccess, then barBusinessLogic, then fooUI.

  • make: In order to "make" barBusinessLogic, you first have to build bazDataAccess. So if you run reactor:make on barBusinessLogic, it will build bazDataAccess, and then build barBusinessLogic; it won't build fooUI. (This should remind you of the traditional "make" tool.)
    barBusinessLogic --> bazDataAccess
  • make-dependents: Because fooUI depends on barBusinessLogic, fooUI is a "dependent" project of barBusinessLogic. Anything that depends on barBusinessLogic is one of barBusinessLogic's "dependents." Hence, reactor:make-dependents will build barBusinessLogic, and then build fooUI.
    fooUI --> barBusinessLogic

In other words, reactor:make walks *down* the dependency tree, whereas reactor:make-dependents walks *up* the dependency tree.

Examples

To provide you with better understanding on some usages of the Reactor Plugin, you can take a look at the examples page.