Activating a settings.xml Defined Maven Profile From POM File

Question

Our enterprise team maintains a settings.xml file that defines various profiles that development projects can use with Maven to build their artifacts and install them in a repository. The expectation is that each project in Jenkins would define a -P parameter with the desired profile specified.

Here is my issue: The profile I need to use specifies a repository that is normally not visible to my project (a staged release repository), so anything in that repository cannot be depended upon without that profile being active. I need a way to activate that profile defined in settings.xml in my project's pom.xml file. Otherwise, when looking at my project in Eclipse, errors are shown in the pom.xml that dependencies cannot be resolved because the profile isn't active to make the repository visible.

Is there a way to activate a settings.xml defined profile in a pom.xml file? Alternatively, is there a way to tell Eclipse to always activate a profile for a particular project?

Answer 1

You can use the activateByDefault tag to specify a default profile to use:

    <profile>
           <id>ProfileToActivate</id>
           <activation>
             <activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>
           </activation>
    </profile>

Answer 2

After more research, I found a project specific Maven property in Eclipse where I can set the active profiles. You can set this by right-clicking on the project, select "Properties", and select "Maven". You are presented with a text entry box for "Active Maven Profiles (comma separated):".

That solved my problem.

I was looking for a more global solution in Eclipse rather than at the project level. But this seems to work.