How can I disable the Maven Javadoc plugin from the command line?

Question

The Javadoc generation can be skipped by setting the property maven.javadoc.skip to true [1], i.e.

-Dmaven.javadoc.skip=true

(and not false)

It seems, that the simple way

-Dmaven.javadoc.skip=true

does not work with the release-plugin. in this case you have to pass the parameter as an "argument"

mvn release:perform -Darguments="-Dmaven.javadoc.skip=true"

You can use the maven.javadoc.skip property to skip execution of the plugin, going by the Mojo's javadoc. You can specify the value as a Maven property:

<properties>
    <maven.javadoc.skip>true</maven.javadoc.skip>
</properties>

or as a command-line argument: -Dmaven.javadoc.skip=true, to skip generation of the Javadocs.

Add to the release plugin config in the root-level pom.xml:

<configuration>
    <arguments>-Dmaven.javadoc.skip=true</arguments>
</configuration>

For newbie Powershell users it is important to know that '.' is a syntactic element of Powershell, so the switch has to be enclosed in double quotes:

mvn clean install "-Dmaven.javadoc.skip=true"