Excluding Source Directory in Maven

Question

Is there a way to exclude a source directory in Maven? I've searched on this topic and find plenty of discussion about excluding Resources, but very little on excluding Sources.

I have a repo with shared projects and several POM files. Most coexist well, but one project has a conflict with one of the source directories and I need to exclude it only from that pom-file.

<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/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
    ...
    <build>
        <sourceDirectory>src/main/java</sourceDirectory>

        # I would like to add this but is not supported
        <excludeSourceDir>src/main/java/com/company/project/conflict-dir</excludeSourceDir>

        <resources>
            <resource>
                <directory>src/main/resources</directory>
                <filtering>true</filtering>
            </resource>
        </resources>

Edit 1: Following the recommendations, I implemented a parent-pom and converted the existing pom files into modules -- each module referencing the parent (excellent instructions here ). I also implemented a "maven-compiler-plugin" which allows one to <exclude> files. Most projects compile and package correctly, except the original troublemaker project is still refusing to compile. Still researching options.

Answer 1

After many hours on this and after converting the code to use modules, I found two things:

• Instead of excluding files, I needed to specify the includes instead:

<artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>3.8.0</version>
    <configuration>
        <source>${maven.compiler.source}</source>
        <target>${maven.compiler.source}</target>
        <encoding>UTF-8</encoding>
        <includes>
            <include>com/company/my_module/*.java</include>
        </includes>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

• The test code from the other modules was being run by default. Yet this modules was not including the code for those tests. I added -Dmaven.test.skip=true to prevent that.