Activate a profile based on environment - maven

Question

Here's my scenario:
Maven 2.0.9 is our build system
We install code to multiple environments
All of our environment-specific properties are contained in property files, one for each environment
We currently read these properties into maven using the properties-maven-plugin; this sub-bullet is not a requirement, just our current solution
Goal:
Perform certain parts of the build (ie. plugin executions) only for certain environments
Control which parts are run by setting values in the environment-specific property files
What I've tried so far:
Maven allows plugins executions to be put inside pom profiles, which can be activated by properties; unfortunately these must be system properties - ie. from settings.xml or the command-line, not from properties loaded by the properties-maven-plugin
If possible, we'd like to keep everything encapsulated within the build workspace, which looks something like this:
project
pom.xml
src
...
conf
dev.properties
test.properties
prod.properties
build-scripts
build.groovy <-- the script that wraps maven to do the build
install.groovy <-- ... wraps maven to do the install
Running a build looks like:
cd build-scripts
./build.groovy
./install.groovy -e prod
Is there any possible way to accomplish these goals with the version of maven we are using? If not, is it possible with a newer version of maven?

Answer 1

This isn't possible using just Maven. (See also How to activate profile by means of maven property?) The reason is that profiles are the first thing evaluated before anything else to determine the effective POM.
My suggestion is to write some preprocessor that parses your environment specific property files and converts them to the required system properties before launching Maven. This script can be included in your ~/.mavenrc so that it runs automatically before Maven is launched. Here is an example script that that assumes the properties file is in a fixed location:
properties=`cat /etc/build-env.properties`
while read line; do
MAVEN_OPTS="$MAVEN_OPTS -D$line"
done <<< "$properties"
If the properties file is not fixed, you'll just need to add something to the script to discover the location (assuming it is discoverable).