Skip a submodule during a Maven build

Maven version 3.2.1 added this feature, you can use the -pl switch (shortcut for --projects list) with ! or - (source) to exclude certain submodules.

mvn -pl '!submodule-to-exclude' installmvn -pl -submodule-to-exclude install

Be careful in bash the character ! is a special character, so you either have to single quote it (like I did) or escape it with the backslash character.

The syntax to exclude multiple module is the same as the inclusion

mvn -pl '!submodule1,!submodule2' installmvn -pl -submodule1,-submodule2 install

EDIT Windows does not seem to like the single quotes, but it is necessary in bash ; in Windows, use double quotes (thanks @awilkinson)

mvn -pl "!submodule1,!submodule2" install

Sure, this can be done using profiles. You can do something like the following in your parent pom.xml.

  ...   <modules>      <module>module1</module>      <module>module2</module>        ...  </modules>  ...  <profiles>     <profile>       <id>ci</id>          <modules>            <module>module1</module>            <module>module2</module>            ...            <module>module-integration-test</module>          </modules>       </profile>  </profiles> ...

In your CI, you would run maven with the ci profile, i.e. mvn -P ci clean install

It's possible to decide which reactor projects to build by specifying the -pl command line argument:

$ mvn --help[...] -pl,--projects <arg>                   Build specified reactor projects                                        instead of all projects[...]

It accepts a comma separated list of parameters in one of the following forms:

• relative path of the folder containing the POM
• [groupId]:artifactId

Thus, given the following structure:

project-root [com.mycorp:parent]  |  + --- server [com.mycorp:server]  |       |  |       + --- orm [com.mycorp.server:orm]  |  + --- client [com.mycorp:client]

You can specify the following command line:

mvn -pl .,server,:client,com.mycorp.server:orm clean install

to build everything. Remove elements in the list to build only the modules you please.

EDIT: as blackbuild pointed out, as of Maven 3.2.1 you have a new -el flag that excludes projects from the reactor, similarly to what -pl does: