Enforce exactly one of two Maven profiles

I had a similar need (i.e. for mutual exclusivity of two profiles) and solved it by considering the two target profiles to be internal profiles that shouldn't be specified on the command line: Instead, a controlling system property can either be specified or not. E.g. let's assume that by default you want the "dev" profile to be active. We can then activate/deactivate the relevant internal profiles based on whether the -Drelease option is specified as follows:

<!-- Internal profile: FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY - active if -Drelease is *not* specified. -->
<profile>
  <id>internal-dev</id>
  <activation>
    <!-- Activation via *absence* of a system property to ensure mutual exclusivity
         of this profile with internal-release -->
    <property>
      <name>!release</name>
    </property>
  </activation>
  ...
</profile>

<!-- Internal profile: FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY - active if -Drelease *is* specified. -->
<profile>
  <id>internal-release</id>
  <activation>
    <!-- Activation via *presence* of a system property to ensure mutual exclusivity
         of this profile with internal-dev -->
    <property>
      <name>release</name>
    </property>
  </activation>
  ...
</profile>

I always issue a build command like so:

mvn package -P-dev,prod

It explicitly disables the dev profile and enables the production one. To my knowledge, you can not conditionally enable one build profile if another is active (which is a bit unfortunate), and because of that you can't ensure that the profiles are mutually exclusive.

The simplest solution for this kind of problem would be to use the maven-enforcer-plugin which exactly has such a rule to force to activate at least one of two or more profiles.

Unfortunately the requireActiveProfile has currently a bug. But currently a preparation for a new release is on going which solves this.

Update The bug mentioned above has been fixed in release 1.4 (which was released in 2015).