How to make Maven fail if a passed flag is invalid?

Question

mvn install -DSkipTests

Will happily run, while running tests (as the correct capitalization is -DskipTests ). I'd like to immediately know that -DSkipTests does nothing, alerting me I've made a typo. Is this possible? Why does it not work this way to start?

Answer 1

The problem: With -D , you just specify arbitrary properties.

Maven does not know if any of your Maven plugins consumes them.

Answer 2

You can use Maven Enforcer Plugin . It provides the Require Property rule which enables you to check if a property is set, and evaluate its value againsts a set of values or regular expressions.