My situation: I have project which contains several Maven modules. I make changes to one of them. Suddenly I find out, that my project is no longer possible to be built because of the errors in other modules. To fix this I need to run SVN UPDATE and rebuilt the project.
My assumption: probably, during the build process of my module some of the artifacts are taken from central repository and have the most newest version, while others are still outdated and taken from my local repo.
A question: I don’t want to rebuild my project each time someone updates ANOTHER Maven module. I want to download the already built artefacts from the central repository without rebuilding them by myself. Is it possible?
You can tell Reactor which modules to build. In your case when you only change a single module and want to speed up the build you can pass -pl (Project Location) parameter to maven. For example:
That will build single module, while taking other dependencies from your local Maven Repository or download from Central (whatever is the latest). That said, if you already ran mvn install for whole project and other artifacts have not been updated in Central repository, then Maven will see your local artifacts as latest and will not re-download them.
Another issue you might get with -pl parameter is when other modules in your project depend on the module that you are building. If there is a problem in dependent module you will not see it by building only the dependency model. To avoid that you can pass -amd (Also Make Dependents). Like this:
That will trigger the build for module-with-changes + modules that depend on module-with-changes + their dependents.
You can get more info about Reactor parameters from here:
http://www.sonatype.com/people/2009/10/maven-tips-and-tricks-advanced-reactor-options/