How can I deploy only the pom file to my snapshot repository in Maven?

Question

I would like to be able to deploy only the POM artifact (file) without the main artifact (JAR, WAR, etc), when running mvn deploy and version is a SNAPSHOT version.

Why?

We several developers working on multiple Maven projects. We have a Hudson server with a job per Maven project and version (e.g. foo-1.2, foo-1.3). Each job builds the project and deploys it to a Nexus server (upon success). Maven projects under development are marked as such by using -SNAPSHOT postfix in the version. For example: 1.2-SNAPSHOT, 1.3-SNAPSHOT.

Here's a sample scenario how a developer work is damaged due to this architecture.

Assume two Maven projects: foo-core and foo-webapp, both at version 1.2-SNAPSHOT.

• Developer A is working on foo-core, made several changes and compiled it.
• Developer A continues to work, but on foo-webapp.
• Developer B started working and changing foo-core. It commits his work and pushes it to the SCM.
• Hudson is triggered by SCM; Builds foo-core and deploys it to the snapshot repository in Nexus.
• Developer A is running mvn install on foo-webapp. Maven is checking with Nexus, and finds that there is a newer version of foo-core in Nexus. It downloads it (filled with developer B changes) and than it fails compilation, since the changes made by developer A are not in the jar located in the local repository. The download overrides the file installed there by developer A.

Existing Solutions

I looked into maven-deploy-plugin, but this plugin deploys all artifacts attached to the project. If they had a way to configure which artifacts to deploy, it would have been great.

Question: Is there any way to solve this without resorting to writing my own deploy plugin, based on maven-deploy-plugin?

Answer 1

Basically to the -Dfile parameter, instead of the artifact, pass the pom.xml. Run the command and yay! mvn deploy won't give you any issues now. Here's a sample deploy command :

$ mvn deploy:deploy-file -DpomFile=pom.xml -Dfile=./pom.xml -DgroupId=my.group.id -DartifactId=artifact-id -DrepositoryId=bigdata-upload-snapshots -Durl=http://maven.mymaven.com/content/repositories/snapshots/

A prerequisite for this is that the repository be added in your settings.xml

[Edit]: I have supplied the parameters -DgroupId and -DartifactId of the project in the sample deploy command but they're not required (refer to Zac's comment below)