How can I change a .properties file in maven depending on my profile?

Question

How can I change a .properties file in maven depending on my profile? Depending on whether the application is built to run on a workstation or the datacenter parts of the file my_config.properties change (but not all).

Currently I manually change the .properties file within the .war file after hudson builds each version.

Answer 1

As often, there are several ways to implement this kind of things. But most of them are variations around the same features: profiles and filtering. I'll show the most simple approach.

First, enable filtering of resources:

<project>   ...   <build>     <resources>       <resource>         <directory>src/main/resources</directory>         <filtering>true</filtering>       </resource>     </resources>     ...   </build> </project> 

Then, declare a place holder in your src/main/resources/my_config.properties, for example:

myprop1 = somevalue myprop2 = ${foo.bar} 

Finally, declare properties and their values in a profile:

<project>   ...   <profiles>     <profile>       <id>env-dev</id>       <activation>         <property>           <name>env</name>           <value>dev</value>         </property>       </activation>       <properties>         <foo.bar>othervalue</foo.bar>       </properties>     </profile>     ...   </profiles> </project> 

And run maven with a given profile:

 $ mvn process-resources -Denv=dev [INFO] Scanning for projects... ... $ cat target/classes/my_config.properties  myprop1 = somevalue myprop2 = othervalue 

As I said, there are variation around this approach (e.g. you can place values to filter in files), but this will get you started.

References

• Introduction to Build Profiles
• Maven Resources Filtering

More resources

• A Maven2 multi-environment filter setup
• Maven project filtering
• Using Maven profiles and resource filtering
• Building For Different Environments with Maven 2