Question

I want to have a profile that triggers a certain plugin(say PMD) but I want to explicitly disable that plugin execution sometimes.

So I want to have a profile that is always active except when a property is defined.

Something like mvn -Dnopmd clean install, and the profile gets de-activated. Other than that the profile should always be active.

Answer 1

You can activate a profile when a property is not specfied like so:

<profile>
       <id>someprofile</id>
       <activation>
           <property>
               <name>!property.name</name>
           </property>
       </activation>
</profile>

This is also explained in the Maven documentation, Introduction to Build Profiles.