Setting default values for custom Maven 2 properties

Question

I have a Maven pom.xml with a plugin that I want to be able to control on the command line. Everything works otherwise fine, except even after searching the net a while I can't figure out how to set a default value for my control property:

<plugin>
    ...
    <configuration>
        <param>${myProperty}</param>
    </configuration>
    ...
</plugin>

So if I run Maven with

mvn -DmyProperty=something ...

everything's fine, but I'd like to have a specific value assigned to myProperty also without the -DmyProperty=... switch. How can this be done?

Answer 1

You can have the property default value defined in <build>/<properties> or in a profile like shown below. When you supply the property value on command line with -DmyProperty=anotherValue then it will override the definition from the POM. That is, all definitions of property values in the POM are set only a default value for the properties.

<profile>
    ...
    <properties>
        <myProperty>defaultValue</myProperty>            
    </properties>
    ...
       <configuration>
          <param>${myProperty}</param>
       </configuration>
    ...
</profile>