Using Snapshots for Rapid Development

The problem:

You are working on a project with a number of other related sub-projects. You would like to release snapshots of your project's artifact (maybe a war or jar) for use in these other projects. This will help those other projects move along while your project is being developed.

The solution:

You can configure your project to produce a snapshot artifact, just add '-SNAPSHOT' to the end of your project's version number in it's pom. Now when you package the project you will get a artifact labeled with SNAPSHOT. You now can take advantage of releasing the snapshot for other projects to use. You should configure a 'snapshotRepository' section in your 'distributionManagement' section of your pom. Here is an example of how this works:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project>
<modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
<groupId>test_snaps</groupId>
<artifactId>test_snaps</artifactId>
<packaging>jar</packaging>
<version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>

<distributionManagement>
 <snapshotRepository>
  <id>test_snapshot_repo</id>
  <uniqueVersion>true</uniqueVersion>
  <name>test_snapshot_repo</name>
  <url>file:/test_snapshot_repo</url>
 </snapshotRepository>
</distributionManagement>

</project>

With the above pom you could type 'mvn deploy' and a unique jar will get deployed. You can check this by checking /test_snapshot_repo/test_snaps/test_snaps/0.0.1-SNAPSHOT/. Run the 'mvn deploy' command a few times and you will see a bunch of these begin to build up.