MVN plugin to ignore test in unmodified submodules

Question

I have a Maven project that has several submodules. because we have dependencies between some of them, we need to run the build from the parent pom.

Because there are a lot of unit tests the build takes a long time. sometimes we are only modifying a single module but we need to wait for everything to build and run tests.

I have an idea of using git diff to ignore the test in unmodified submodules. I started with a python program and I can get the diff and find the modules with changes.

but this will require a separate program to run and execute mvn.

So I started thinking about doing a plugin for mvn that either extends or is a dependency to maven-surefire-plugin.

Is this possible can I change the behavior of another mvn plugin. I not familiar with developing mvn plugin. I wanted to get feedback from people with experience on it or find out if there is another solution.

Answer 1

This may not answer your question directly. However, I believe you could use the -pl flag to build only those modules that you actually modified.

Something like - mvn -pl library1 clean install, would cause only the submodule library1 to be built and installed.

Related/helpful StackOverflow question here.