Maven Modules + Building a Single Specific Module

Any best practices here?

Use the Maven advanced reactor options, more specifically:

-pl, --projects
        Build specified reactor projects instead of all projects
-am, --also-make
        If project list is specified, also build projects required by the list

So just cd into the parent P directory and run:

mvn install -pl B -am

And this will build B and the modules required by B.

Note that you need to use a colon if you are referencing an artifactId which differs from the directory name:

mvn install -pl :B -am

As described here:

Define modules list which shall be build in Maven multiproject build

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Say Parent pom.xml contains 6 modules and you want to run A, B and F.

<modules>
        <module>A</module>
        <module>B</module>
        <module>C</module>
        <module>D</module>
        <module>E</module>
        <module>F</module>
  </modules>

1- cd into parent project

 mvn --projects A,B,F --also-make clean install

OR

mvn -pl A,B,F -am clean install

OR

mvn -pl A,B,F -amd clean install

Note: When you specify a project with the -am option, Maven will build all of the projects that the specified project depends upon (either directly or indirectly). Maven will examine the list of projects and walk down the dependency tree, finding all of the projects that it needs to build.

While the -am command makes all of the projects required by a particular project in a multi-module build, the -amd or --also-make-dependents option configures Maven to build a project and any project that depends on that project. When using --also-make-dependents, Maven will examine all of the projects in our reactor to find projects that depend on a particular project. It will automatically build those projects and nothing else.

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Maven absolutely was designed for this type of dependency.

mvn package won't install anything in your local repository it just packages the project and leaves it in the target folder.

Do mvn install in parent project (A), with this all the sub-modules will be installed in your computer's Maven repository, if there are no changes you just need to compile/package the sub-module (B) and Maven will take the already packaged and installed dependencies just right.

You just need to a mvn install in the parent project if you updated some portion of the code.

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If you have previously run mvn install on project B it will have been installed to your local repository, so when you build package A Maven can resolve the dependency. So as long as you install project B each time you change it your builds for project A will be up to date.

You can define a multi-module project with an aggregator pom to build a set of projects.

It's also worthwhile mentioning m2eclipse, it integrates Maven into Eclipse and allows you to (optionally) resolve dependencies from the workspace. So if you are hacking away on multiple projects, the workspace content will be used for compilation. Once you are happy with your changes, run mvn install (on each project in turn, or using an aggregator) to put them in your local repository.

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Take a look at my answer Maven and dependent modules.

The Maven Reactor plugin is designed to deal with building part of a project.

The particular goal you'll want to use it reactor:make.

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You say you "really just want B", but this is false. You want B, but you also want an updated A if there have been any changes to it ("active development").

So, sometimes you want to work with A, B, and C. For this case you have aggregator project P. For the case where you want to work with A and B (but do not want C), you should create aggregator project Q.

Edit 2016: The above information was perhaps relevant in 2009. As of 2016, I highly recommend ignoring this in most cases, and simply using the -am or -pl command-line flags as described in the accepted answer. If you're using a version of maven from before v2.1, change that first :)

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You Compile, Package, Clean specific modules using this command:

mvn <target> -pl <MODULE> -am

Specify module or project name using -pl

-am is also make.

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