Question

I have what seems to be a simple question regarding how to setup Jenkins and maven 3.

For the sake of simplicity lets say that we have four projects:

Model which has no dependencies
Commons which depends on Model
Server which depends on Common and Model
Frontend which depends on Model

What I want to achieve is that a success build on Model triggers new build on all projects which in its pom has a dependency on Model (here Common, Server and Frontend)

If Common fails then there is no need to build Server.

In the above case it seems that I can fix this by manually setting up dependent projects on Model and Commons but this information can already be found in the pom files for each project (Server and Frontend) which makes me conclude/wish that Jenkins should be able to figure this out by it self.

Can Jenkins deduce the dependency tree by parsing the pom on each project defined in Jenkins and do some kind of optimal build order / dependency handling automatically or do I have to setup “Block build when upstream project is building” and “Build after other projects are built [List of dependent projects]” as described above ?

I am using Jenkins version 1.473 and Maven 3.
Our maven project pom’s do not use the parent or module tag.

/Benjamin

Answer 1

The best solution for such thing is to create a multi-module build which results in the following structure:

root (pom.xml)
  +--- model (pom.xml)
  +--- commons (pom.xml)
  +--- server (pom.xml)
  +--- frontend (pom.xml)

In each module for example in commons you define a dependency to the model module etc.
The build order will be automatically done by maven.

With such kind of project you can simply go to the root and do:

mvn clean package

You can also use:

mvn --pl --am server

which will build server but also all depending modules automatically.