Maven run only the parent pom with a profile - maven

Question

In my project, I have a custom profile custom-profile-name.
A simplified structure of my POM looks like this:
<artifactId>parent</artifactId>
<modules>
<module>child</module>
</modules>
When I run
mvn help:active-profiles -P custom-profile-name
I get:
Active Profiles for Project 'org.sample:parent:pom':
The following profiles are active:
custom-profile-name
Active Profiles for Project 'org.sample:child':
The following profiles are active:
custom-profile-name
I've been reading about profile inheritance and If I understand correctly, profiles should not be inherited. Can anyone explain why the custom-profile-name is active in the child module.
My ultimate goal is to execute the parent with one configuration of a custom plugin and all child modules with another configuration of the same plugin.

Answer 1

Not sure why both parent and child modules are getting activated for custom-profile-name. But to get whats needed for you can be done by defining properties inside the profile.
Example:
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd">
<modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
<groupId>com.mycompany.app</groupId>
<artifactId>parent</artifactId>
<packaging>pom</packaging>
<version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
<name>parent-app</name>
<url>http://maven.apache.org</url>
<modules>
<module>child</module>
</modules>
<profiles>
<profile>
<id>default</id>
<activation>
<activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>
</activation>
<modules>
<module>child</module>
</modules>
<properties>
<parentProp>foo</parentProp>
<childProp>foo</childProp>
</properties>
</profile>
<profile>
<id>custom-profile-name</id>
<modules>
<module>child</module>
</modules>
<properties>
<parentProp>xyz</parentProp>
<childProp>abc</childProp>
</properties>
</profile>
</profiles>
The 'parentProp' is a configuration used by the parent pom and 'childProp' is the configuration used by the child pom. From the configuration it can be seen that the default profile and the 'custom-profile-name' profile behaves differently as the values for the properties is different.