Question

I would like to build modules via an aggregator, but avoid the aggregator project being built itself. In my use-case, the aggregator is a dummy wrapper simply used for grouping together a build, and has no significance as a project in its own right

Is it possible to remove the aggregator from the reactor somehow?

Answer 1

AFAIK there’s no way of doing that. But I believe your real problem is that this aggregator artifact is deployed to remote repository along with other modules and it doesn’t make sense, as you said. What I recommend then is to set <skip>true</skip> for maven-deploy-plugin in aggregator’s pom.xml to disable its deploy, like this:

<plugin>
  <artifactId>maven-deploy-plugin</artifactId>
  <configuration>
    <skip>true</skip>
  </configuration>
</plugin>

maven-deploy-plugin supports this since version 2.4.