Welcome to the cascading-release-maven-plugin wiki!

Most Maven users use the maven-release-plugin and for most people it works pretty well. Although, on bigger projects, you sometimes need something more.

Problem

Let's say you have a project with the following structure:

• [project root]
  • api
    • api-1
    • api-2
    • api-3
    • api-4
    • api-5
    • api-6
  • utilities
    • util-1
    • util-2
    • util-3
  • service
    • service-api
    • service-impl
    • service-rest
    • service-jms
  • framework
    • framework-jar
    • framework-war
    • framework-ear
    • framework-config
  • etc
    • etc-1
  • and-some-more-modules
    • 1
    • 2

Each "module" has it's own lifecycle and versioning scheme, so for example api-1 can have version 2.5 and api-2 can have version 1.2, etc.

And let's say that there are dependencies from one to the other module. It then quickly becomes a pain to work in this project, either because you have to release individual modules very often, or because you have a lot of work (at the end of your sprint) making the release.

This should be easier and this is where this plugin steps in. It allows you to have SNAPSHOT dependencies among your modules and when you would like to make a release, it automatically finds out which modules need to be released, releases them, updates dependency versions in the dependent poms, and all of this in the correct order.

Workings

Basically what you would like to release is an EAR, maybe with some config files and maybe accompanied with some docs, like an install guide, release notes, etc.

In the EAR POM.xml you need to specify some meta information about the project you would like to release. Below is a small example of such a configuration: nl.jkva cascading-release-maven-plugin 1.0-SNAPSHOT release parent

If you have this file, all you have to do, is run the plugin from your EAR directory, like this: mvn nl.jkva:cascading-release-maven-plugin:1.0-SNAPSHOT:cascading-release

The version (currently mandatory) can be used for specifying a functional version for your release. Currently this parameter doesn't do anything.

Prerequisites

• You have Maven and a SCM client installed (this is handled through the Maven-SCM-Plugin).
• You have an environment variable called M2_BIN, which points to the Maven (like /usr/share/maven3/bin/mvn) executable.
• In your parent pom (if any) you don't specify the versions of any modules you would like to release (which is bad practice anyway). This means not just or , but also any that you refer to in your child poms. Specifying versions to external libraries (like Spring Framework) is no problem.
• You have no local modifications in your working copy (the plugin checks for this when it starts).
• You're mentally prepared to hand over the responsibility of releasing automatically, instead of manually.