Passing properties to the Maven release plugin

The Maven release plugin does not propagate system properties to the maven release build. This can cause confusion when you try to set properties for a maven release. For example, if your pom.xml uses a custom property "some-property" that you intend to set for a release, you might be tempted to try this:

mvn release:prepare -Dsome-property=foo

Although this works for regular build, it will not work for a release build. This is because the release plugin forks a new instance for the release build, and properties passed to the parent are not propagated to the forked build.

To solve this problem, you need to propagate the properties yourself by configuring the argument property of the release plugin. For example:

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd">
  <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
  <groupId>com.overstock.example</groupId>
  <artifactId>helloworld</artifactId>
  <packaging>jar</packaging>
  <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
  <name>helloworld</name>
  <url>http://maven.apache.org</url>

  <build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-release-plugin</artifactId>
        <configuration>
          <arguments>-Dsome-property=${some-property}</arguments>  
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>

</project>

If you need to propagate more than 1 property, the arguments property allows for multiple values separated by spaces.