Maven Release

Prepare the release
Run the following command:

mvn release:prepare

This command will prompt you for a release version name, the next version name and will tag the code in CVS.

For example, if the current version in your pom is 1_10-SNAPSHOT, after running release:prepare, the version will be changed to 1_10, maven will commit (with a comment of [maven-release-plugin] prepare release myapp-1_10), tag as myapp-1_10, bump the pom version to 1_11-SNAPSHOT and commit it (with a comment of [maven-release-plugin] prepare for next development iteration).

release:prepare will also create a file called release.properties, shown below:

maven.username=sharfah
checkpoint.transformed-pom-for-release=OK
scm.tag=myapp-1_10
scm.url=scm:cvs:pserver::@sourceforge.uk.db.com:/data/cvsroot/apps:MyApp
checkpoint.transform-pom-for-development=OK
checkpoint.local-modifications-checked=OK
checkpoint.initialized=OK
checkpoint.checked-in-release-version=OK
checkpoint.tagged-release=OK
checkpoint.prepared-release=OK
checkpoint.check-in-development-version=OK

Perform the release
Run the following command:

mvn release:perform

This will use the release.properties file in order to check-out the tagged version from source control, compile, test and deploy it to the maven repository. If you have deleted your release.properties file, don't worry, you can just create a dummy one yourself, using the sample above.

If you want to skip site-deploy run the following command instead:

mvn release:perform -Dgoals=deploy

Related posts:
Quick Maven Commands
Skip Tests in Maven