Maven Modules + Building a Single Specific Module

Any best practices here?

Use the Maven advanced reactor options, more specifically:

-pl, --projects
        Build specified reactor projects instead of all projects
-am, --also-make
        If project list is specified, also build projects required by the list

So just cd into the parent P directory and run:

mvn install -pl B -am

And this will build B and the modules required by B.

Note that you need to use a colon if you are referencing an artifactId which differs from the directory name:

mvn install -pl :B -am

As described here:

• Define modules list which shall be build in Maven multiproject build

Say Parent pom.xml contains 6 modules and you want to run A, B and F.

<modules>
        <module>A</module>
        <module>B</module>
        <module>C</module>
        <module>D</module>
        <module>E</module>
        <module>F</module>
  </modules>

1- cd into parent project

 mvn --projects A,B,F --also-make clean install

OR

mvn -pl A,B,F -am clean install

OR

mvn -pl A,B,F -amd clean install

Note: When you specify a project with the -am option, Maven will build all of the projects that the specified project depends upon (either directly or indirectly). Maven will examine the list of projects and walk down the dependency tree, finding all of the projects that it needs to build.

While the -am command makes all of the projects required by a particular project in a multi-module build, the -amd or --also-make-dependents option configures Maven to build a project and any project that depends on that project. When using --also-make-dependents, Maven will examine all of the projects in our reactor to find projects that depend on a particular project. It will automatically build those projects and nothing else.

Maven absolutely was designed for this type of dependency.

mvn package won't install anything in your local repository it just packages the project and leaves it in the target folder.

Do mvn install in parent project (A), with this all the sub-modules will be installed in your computer's Maven repository, if there are no changes you just need to compile/package the sub-module (B) and Maven will take the already packaged and installed dependencies just right.

You just need to a mvn install in the parent project if you updated some portion of the code.