Maven command line paramters

Maven command line paramters

Skip tests

You can stop tests from running by setting a command line option when invoking Maven:

mvn install -Dmaven.test.skip=true 

There are plenty of reasons why you should avoid doing this, but the most common reason to skip tests is when you are utterly convinced that the change you should work but maybe it doesn’t so rather than committing to waiting for the test suite to run it’s quicker to try it and keep quickly hacking until it does. Beware of anyone who suggests putting this option in the MAVEN_OPTS as a default.

Using this on a frequent basis is a hint that the tests are broken and need urgent attention; it’s not so much as a code-smell as a full-on stink.

Global Maven options

If you need to make settings permanent and don’t want to specify them every time you call ‘mvn’ then the easiest way is to add them to your .bashrc as MAVEN_OPTS. This works in the same way as JAVA_OPTS, and allows you to send properties to the Java process used by Maven.

For example, if you wanted to enable assertions in the JVM, and set AWT headless true then this export statement will set this for all calls to ‘mvn’:

export MAVEN_OPTS="-ea -Djava.awt.headless=true"

On Windows, just add this to your environment variables and restart your command line.