How to continuously build and deploy feature branches with Maven?

Question

My team is using feature branches to implement new features and continuously deploys snapshot builds into a remote repo for our users to use. Thus \'deploy\' really only mea

Answer 1

Using the version number to store the branch name, as suggested by others, is a quick win, but leads to problems if you use version ranges. The version number was not meant to be used like that. We use them in a continuous integration process to make the integration tests depend on the tested artifact:

[1.8-SNAPSHOT,1.9-SNAPSHOT)

The qualifier part inside the version number denotes different incremental stages of the same code base:

1.8-alpha1-SNAPSHOT
1.8-alpha1-SNAPSHOT
1.8-beta1-SNAPSHOT

This is why the version range above will capture the above and Maven will order them in this order:

1.8-SNAPSHOT
1.8-alpha1-SNAPSHOT
1.8-alpha1-SNAPSHOT
1.8-beta1-SNAPSHOT

Any artifact carrying the feature branch name in the version number (1.8-featureA-SNAPSHOT) will be ordered newer than the snapshots without qualifier. But a feature branch is a 'different' code base, not a newer representation of the same code base. For our integration test scenario this led to useless test failures. The feature branch was not ready yet to be tested by integration tests.

We now follow this rule: if you have to change something anyway, why not the artifact id? We change the artifact id for feature branches and it works just fine.