Maven Parent Version Update

Maven is a popular build tool in Java Eco System. Often we need to update the parent version in child modules when working with a multi-modules project. Versions is a Maven plugin that can automate updating the parent version.

The following commands update the parent version in child modules:

mvn versions:update-parent
mvn versions:commit

How it works

mvn versions:update-parent

1. It picks the version from the local maven repository.
2. It updates the parent versions declared in the child module pom.xml on which the command is run.
3. It produces pom.xml.versionsBackup as the backup pom file.

If you want to pick the latest version of the parent from the remote maven repository, then run mvn versions:update-parent -U.

mvn versions:commit

It cleans up pom.xml.versionsBackup.

The following command is helpful if you need to revert to the previous parent version:

mvn versions:revert

It cleans up pom.xml.versionsBackup and reverts the parent version update.

Note: This command will only function if the file pom.xml.versionsBackup exists; If you accidentally deleted the backup file, you’ll need to restore the previous version manually.

Drawback

The only disadvantage of Versions plugin is that it must be run from the root of the child module. With the increased number of child modules, this may appear to be excessive. However, this limitation can be overcome using other utility commands:

ls -l | grep ^d | awk '{print $9}' | 
xargs -I {}  mvn -f {}/pom.xml versions:update-parent

The above command runs the versions:update-parent in each subdirectory of the current directory.