Adding environment dependent parameters to the build - maven

Question

In my company's parent POM I specify corporate repositories, that we all use. The URLs contain server name and the path of course. Each time I change the POM I publish a new version.
Now imagine, that the server hosting our repos gets renamed. I can change all URLs in the parent POM (not a problem) and publish a new version with fixed URLs. But I can't change URLs in the existing versions of the parent POM.
This means, that I can't rebuild any artifact from the past.
Is there some standard way to get around this problem? Like:
Central property file
A configuration POM with a fixed 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT version, that get republished on any change?

Answer 1

You never put repositories except for distMngt in your POM. Again -- never. You have burned your POMs forever. This exists in Maven because repo managers did not exist back then. It is bad practice for years now and shall be removed.
Always use a Nexus instance with a repo group. This shall be added to your settings.xml which will mirror everything.
For those who don't believe, I am a long year Maven committer.

Answer 2

Another approach that we employ at work is to replace the URLs in the <distributionManagement> with parameters, like so:
<distributionManagement>
<repository>
<id>my-repo</id>
<name>My Release Repo</name>
<url>${url.deploy.releases}</url>
</repository>
<snapshotRepository>
<id>my-repo</id>
<name>My Release Repo</name>
<url>${url.deploy.snapshots}</url>
</snapshotRepository>
</distributionManagement>
This way, we use settings.xml to control where the artifacts should be deployed. This has the advantage that if you ever migrate a repository (which we did) you only need to update settings.xml for new builds/releases.
If you need to go back to an earlier release and republish (for whatever reason) you just checkout the release tag, set up settings.xml to point to the new repo and do a mvn clean deploy.
If you can't modify settings.xml you can always just copy it, change the copy and point out the new settings file with the -s flag.
This approach also works for <scm> tags.

Answer 3

If you use repositories in your parent pom and may change over time, the best strategy is in the URL or it use ALIAS (DNS, Apache redirect, Rewriting) and especially not the IP address directly , and you do not have to change the address of the repository every time.
Example:
<repositories>
<repository>
<id>myrepo</id>
<url>http://myrepo.me/content/repositories/public/</url>
</repository>
</repositories>
and:
http://myrepo.me/content/repositories/public/ => ip address 1.2.3.4/*/*/