how to force maven install on dependent project?

Question

I have project B which depends on project A.

On project B's pom.xml file, I have declared A dependency as:

<dependency>
   <groupId></groupId>
   <artifactId>A</artifact>
   <version>1</version>
   <scope>compile</scope>
</dependency>

But every time I make any changes on project A, I have to run maven install on eclipse, to install the project to my user's repository.

How can I make sure project A is built and installed before project B is built and ran?

Answer 1

Use a module with packaging=pom to control the entire build. In another Eclipse project, call it top-level, have this pom:

<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/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>

    <groupId></groupId>
    <artifactId>top-level</artifactId>
    <version>1</version>
    <packaging>pom</packaging>

    <modules>
        <module>../A</module>
        <module>../B</module>
    </modules>
</project>

Then perform your maven operations (clean, install, etc.) on this pom. Maven will figure out the right order for processing the modules.

One word of warning: Maven uses the file system to access the relative pom locations for A and B. This only works if all three projects are under the same root directory (the Eclipse workspace root, the git repo root directory, etc.)