Version lifecycle plugin

This Maven plugin aims to provide a better experience regarding version management in Maven. It does this by introducing a new lifecycle. This allows to bump major, minor or patch version numbers with a simple command while still being able to run other plugins during the creation of the version. Output generated from these plugins can easily be added and included in the release tag.

Maturity

This project has reached stable and version 1.0.0 has been released.

Usage

    <build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>com.anton-johansson</groupId>
                <artifactId>version-lifecycle-maven-plugin</artifactId>
                <version>1.0.0</version>
                <extensions>true</extensions>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>

Major versions

$ mvn version -Dmajor

Minor versions

$ mvn version -Dminor

Patch versions

$ mvn version -Dpatch

Inspiration

This plugin has gotten a lot of inspiration from the npm version command, which is a great tool for managing your versions. It's also inspired by Versions Maven Plugin and actually uses some of its goals as the default goals for some of the lifecycle phases.

Assumptions

This project tries to not asume too much about your work flow, but it does assume a few things. It assumes that...

• ... you are using Git as your version control system.
• ... artifacts will be published either by a CI tool or manually after the release is created. This lifecycle has no relation to the deploy lifecycle phase.

The lifecycle

Here is an explained table of the whole lifecycle:

Phase	Task
version-validate	A good place to perform pre-flight checks. By default, does not allow version change, if there are uncommitted changes.
version-prepare-release	Prepares the lifecycle by finding out the next version for the specified type.
version-prepare-release-version	Sets the version attribute in the POM.
version-prepare-release-tag	Sets the scm.tag attribute in the POM.
version-process-release	Does nothing by default. A good place to make any pre-commit changes to files, such as generating changelog.
version-commit-release	Commits the changes for the release.
version-prepare-snapshot	Prepares the lifecycle by finding out the next development version.
version-prepare-snapshot-version	Sets the version attribute in the POM.
version-prepare-snapshot-tag	Sets the scm.tag attribute in the POM.
version-process-snapshot	Does nothing by default. A good place to make any pre-commit changes to files.
version-commit-snapshot	Commits the changes for the snapshot version.
version	Does nothing. Its sole purpose is to provide a neat command to create new versions.

Parameters

Name	Property	Default value	Description
major			Triggers a major version bump. Mutually exclusive with minor and patch.
minor			Triggers a minor version bump. Mutually exclusive with major and patch.
patch			Triggers a patch version bump. Mutually exclusive with major and minor.
tagPrefix	version.tagPrefix	v	The prefix for release tags.
tagSuffix	version.tagSuffix		The suffix for release tags.
generateBackupPoms	generateBackupPoms	false	Indicates whether or not to generate backup POMs when changes are made.
releaseCommitMessagePattern	version.releaseCommitMessagePattern	[version]	The commit message to use for releases. The placeholder [version] will be replaced with the actual version number.
snapshotCommitMessagePattern	version.snapshotCommitMessagePattern	Preparing for the next development iteration	The commit message to use for snapshots.
releaseFilePatternsToAdd	version.releaseFilePatternsToAdd	.	File patterns to add to the Git index before committing the release.
snapshotFilePatternsToAdd	version.snapshotFilePatternsToAdd	.	File patterns to add to the Git index before committing the snapshot.
checkForUncommittedChanges	checkForUncommittedChanges	true	Checks for uncommitted changes and aborts, if there are any.

Signed commits

There is an issue with signed commits. JGit (the underlying library for managing Git operations) does not have support for GPG 2.2 file format. The file, ~/.gnupg/pubring.kbx will be considered empty. A workaround for this is the following command, which will provide an older format:

$ gpg --export > ~/.gnupg/pubring.gpg

Release

For releasing this project, you can use the project iself to create a new tag:

$ mvn version -Dminor

However, we have no automatic CI pipeline that deploys the artifacts. To do that, use:

$ git checkout <tag to deploy>
$ mvn deploy -Psonatype-oss-release

Use -Dgpg.keyname=<ID of key> if you have multiple GPG keys and want to select one.

License

Apache License © Anton Johansson