Can I tailor a maven build based on platform?

Question

Specifically, I run the launch4j-maven-plugin plugin to generate me an .exe file. This only works on Windows, so I was wondering if I could 'opt-out' of this step on other platforms?

The plugin is tied to the execution phase like this

<plugin>
...
<execution>
     <id>l4j-clui</id>
     <phase>package</phase>
     <goals>
          <goal>launch4j</goal>
     </goals>
</execution>
...

Answer 1

You can wrap that plugin under separate build profile and just enable that profile on the build that you want

For example:

<project>
  ...
<profile>
<id>generate-exe</id>
  <build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <!_- your plugin configuration -->
      </plugin>
      ...
    </plugins>
  </build>
</profile>
  ...
</project>

Now pass parameter while launching maven to specify profile

For example:

mvn clean install -Pgenerate-exe