Integrating Maven With CI/CD

Introduction

Modern software development relies on Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) pipelines to automate building, testing, and deploying applications.

Maven integrates seamlessly with CI/CD tools such as Jenkins and GitHub Actions, making it easy to automate builds, run tests, and publish artifacts to repositories like Nexus and Artifactory.

In this lesson, you’ll learn:

• How to run Maven in Jenkins and GitHub Actions
• How to skip tests for faster builds (-DskipTests)
• How to deploy Maven artifacts to Nexus/Artifactory

1. Running Maven in Jenkins

Jenkins is one of the most widely used CI/CD tools, and Maven integrates with it out-of-the-box.

Example: Jenkins Pipeline with Maven:

pipeline {
    agent any
    stages {
        stage('Checkout') {
            steps {
                git 'https://github.com/example/my-app.git'
            }
        }
        stage('Build with Maven') {
            steps {
                sh 'mvn clean install'
            }
        }
        stage('Test') {
            steps {
                sh 'mvn test'
            }
        }
    }
}

✅ Jenkins can automatically detect your pom.xml and run Maven commands.
✅ Build results, test reports, and artifacts can be stored and displayed in Jenkins.

2. Running Maven in GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions is a cloud-native CI/CD platform directly integrated with GitHub repositories.

Example: GitHub Actions Workflow with Maven:

Create .github/workflows/maven.yml in your repo:

name: Java CI with Maven

on: [push, pull_request]

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v3
    - name: Set up JDK 17
      uses: actions/setup-java@v3
      with:
        distribution: 'temurin'
        java-version: '17'
        cache: 'maven'
    - name: Build with Maven
      run: mvn clean install

✅ Automatically runs mvn clean install on every push or pull request.
✅ Caches dependencies for faster builds.

3. Skipping Tests for Faster Builds

In CI/CD pipelines, sometimes you want to build quickly without running unit tests (e.g., during prototyping).

Maven provides the -DskipTests flag:

mvn clean install -DskipTests

• -DskipTests → Compiles test code but does not run tests.
• -Dmaven.test.skip=true → Skips compiling and running test code.

📌 Use this only when necessary — skipping tests in production pipelines is risky.

4. Deploying Artifacts to Nexus/Artifactory

Maven can automatically deploy build artifacts (JARs, WARs, POMs) to artifact repositories such as Sonatype Nexus or JFrog Artifactory.

Step 1: Configure distributionManagement in pom.xml

<distributionManagement>
    <repository>
        <id>releases</id>
        <url>http://nexus.example.com/repository/maven-releases/</url>
    </repository>
    <snapshotRepository>
        <id>snapshots</id>
        <url>http://nexus.example.com/repository/maven-snapshots/</url>
    </snapshotRepository>
</distributionManagement>

Step 2: Add Credentials in settings.xml

Located at ~/.m2/settings.xml:

<servers>
    <server>
        <id>releases</id>
        <username>deploy_user</username>
        <password>deploy_password</password>
    </server>
    <server>
        <id>snapshots</id>
        <username>deploy_user</username>
        <password>deploy_password</password>
    </server>
</servers>

Step 3: Deploy Artifact

mvn clean deploy

✅ Uploads the artifact to Nexus/Artifactory
✅ Used in enterprise projects for sharing artifacts across teams

Best Practices for Maven in CI/CD

• Always run tests in production pipelines (skip tests only in dev builds).
• Cache Maven dependencies in CI/CD for faster builds.
• Use profiles (dev, test, prod) to adapt builds to environments.
• Keep credentials in CI/CD secrets, not hardcoded in pom.xml.

Key Takeaways

• Maven integrates seamlessly with CI/CD tools like Jenkins and GitHub Actions.
• Use -DskipTests for faster builds, but avoid skipping tests in production.
• Artifacts can be deployed to Nexus or Artifactory using Maven’s deploy phase.