Maven release plugin fails : source artifacts getting deployed twice

Try running mvn -Prelease-profile help:effective-pom. You will find that you have two execution sections for maven-source-plugin

The output will look something like this:

    <plugin>

      <artifactId>maven-source-plugin</artifactId>
      <version>2.0.4</version>
      <executions>
        <execution>
          <id>attach-sources</id>
          <goals>
            <goal>jar</goal>
          </goals>
        </execution>
        <execution>
          <goals>
            <goal>jar</goal>
          </goals>
        </execution>
      </executions>
    </plugin>

To fix this problem, find everywhere you have used maven-source-plugin and make sure that you use the "id" attach-sources so that it is the same as the release profile. Then these sections will be merged.

Best practice says that to get consistency you need to configure this in the root POM of your project in build > pluginManagement and NOT in your child poms. In the child pom you just specify in build > plugins that you want to use maven-source-plugin but you provide no executions.

In the root pom.xml:

<build>
  <pluginManagement>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-source-plugin</artifactId>
        <executions>
          <execution>
            <!-- This id must match the -Prelease-profile id value or else sources will be "uploaded" twice, which causes Nexus to fail -->
            <id>attach-sources</id>
            <goals>
              <goal>jar</goal>
            </goals>
          </execution>
        </executions>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>    
  </pluginManagement>
</build>

In the child pom.xml:

<build>
  <plugins>
    <plugin>
      <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
      <artifactId>maven-source-plugin</artifactId>
    </plugin>
  </plugins>
</build>

I have been struggeling with this issue for a while and have finally been able to resolve it in our infrastructure. The answers here didn't help me, as we didn't have multiple executions of the source plugin goals and the configuration seemed fine to us.

What we did miss out was to bind the execution of the source plugin to a phase. Extending the example by Bae, including the line <phase>install</phase> to the execution resolved the issue for us:

<plugin>
  <artifactId>maven-source-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>2.0.4</version>
  <executions>
    <execution>
      <id>attach-sources</id>
      <phase>install</phase>
      <goals>
        <goal>jar</goal>
      </goals>
    </execution>
  </executions>
</plugin>

I suspect the solution lies in this answer here; different plugins seem to be invoking the jar goal / the attach-sources execution. By binding our execution to a certain phase, we force our plugin only to be run in this phase.

I know this question is old but it was google hit #1 today so I'll add my answer appropriate for recent versions of maven 3.

The symptom is that sources and javadoc jars are deployed twice when doing a release build with some versions of maven 3. If you're using maven to deploy your artifacts to a Sonatype Nexus repository that only allows a release artifact to be uploaded once (which is totally reasonable behavior), the build fails when the second upload attempt is rejected. Argh!

Maven versions 3.2.3 thru 3.3.9 have bugs - see https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MNG-5868 and https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MNG-5939. Those versions generate and deploy sources and javadoc jars twice when doing a release.

If I read the Maven issue tracker correctly, those bugs are not scheduled for fix as of this writing (the burned 3.4.0 release probably affected these).

Instead of a complex tweak to my pom, my simple workaround was to fall back to Maven version 3.2.1.

Just having hit the same problem, I analyzed it a bit. mvn release:perform evaluates the release.properties file, then checks out the tag in a temporary directory and invokes there something like

/usr/bin/mvn -D maven.repo.local=... -s /tmp/release-settings5747060794.xml
    -D performRelease=true -P set-envs,maven,set-envs deploy

I tried to reproduce this – manually checked out the tag produced by release:prepare and invoked this:

mvn -D performRelease=true -P set-envs,maven,set-envs deploy

I got the same result: It was trying to upload the -sources.jar twice.

As noted by qualidafial in a comment, setting performRelease=false instead omits one of the two attachments of the same file.

I don't really have an idea how the deploy plugin (or any other plugin) uses this property.

We can provide this parameter as a configuration to the maven-relase-plugin:

<build>
    <plugins>
         <plugin>
            <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-release-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>2.3.2</version>
            <configuration>
                <useReleaseProfile>false</useReleaseProfile>
            </configuration>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>

I now added the <useReleaseProfile>false</useReleaseProfile> line to all the POMs, and it looks like releasing now works without an error message.