Maven error: "You don't have a SNAPSHOT project in the reactor projects list."

Question

What on earth does this mean? Cant find any help via google.

>  mvn release:prepare
[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[INFO]                                                                         
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Building Base 1.0.5
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] 
[INFO] --- maven-release-plugin:2.3.2:prepare (default-cli) @ base ---
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD FAILURE
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 1.386s
[INFO] Finished at: Tue Oct 08 08:22:46 EST 2013
[INFO] Final Memory: 9M/81M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ERROR] Failed to execute goal org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-release-plugin:2.3.2:prepare (default-cli) on project base: You don't have a SNAPSHOT project in the reactor projects list. -> [Help 1]

Answer 1

release:prepare command is supposed to prepare your snapshot project for the release. It sounds like you don't have such a snapshot project.

Here's the full details what it'll do: http://maven.apache.org/maven-release/maven-release-plugin/examples/prepare-release.html

If you're sure you should be releasing, you should be working on a maven module that has version ending with -SNAPSHOT.

Update: like noted by @khmarbaise in the comments, if your release has failed, you should do release:rollback to go back to previous state. Note though that it is not supported if you release through jenkins (jenkins issue), and it won't rollback the tags.