Using Maven for multiple deployment environment (production/development)

FYI best practice is to not have to rebuild your artifact for different environments - as that does not lead to re-produce-able builds, and other things could potentially change when rebuilding. I.e. using resource-filtering, as suggested above, only works when re-building your project.

When you graduate an artifact from dev to test or acceptance test to production - you do not want to have to rebuild.

What you want to do, is actually have your configuration dynamic, dependent on run-time variables. I.e. different spring setups or properties files for different environments e.g:

db-dev.properties
db-test.properties
db-prod.properties

Then you can switch between these configurations using run-time variables and Spring's PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer.

You can also actually use different spring configuration files as well, as I've done in the past, for more complex setups.

I also suggest you leave your 'default' setup as production - so that if you deploy to production, you don't need to worry if you forget to set the environment variable.

I prefer use maven profiles for this situation. For example we have directory structure:

src/main/resources
|
+- local
|  |
|  `- specific.properties
+- dev
   |
   `- specific.properties

In pom.xml define two profiles:

<profiles>
    <profile>
        <id>local</id>
        <activation>
            <activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>
        </activation>
        <build>
            <resources>
                <resource>
                    <directory>src/main/resources/local</directory>
                </resource>
            </resources>
        </build>
    </profile>
    <profile>
        <id>dev</id>
        <build>
            <resources>
                <resource>
                    <directory>src/main/resources/dev</directory>
                </resource>
            </resources>
        </build>
    </profile>
</profiles>

In that case, I dont need to update every time pom.xml for new files. In IDE simply switch profiles, or use -P flag from command line.

UPD: what to do if some properties are the same for configurations? Make the configuration like this:

<profiles>
    <profile>
        <id>local</id>
        <activation>
            <activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>
        </activation>
        <build>
            <resources>
                <resource>
                    <directory>src/main/resources</directory>
                </resource>
                <resource>
                    <directory>src/main/config/local</directory>
                </resource>
            </resources>
        </build>
    </profile>
    <profile>
        <id>dev</id>
        <build>
            <resources>
                <resource>
                    <directory>src/main/resources</directory>
                </resource>
                <resource>
                    <directory>src/main/config/dev</directory>
                </resource>
            </resources>
        </build>
    </profile>
</profiles>

Common part will be stored in src/main/resources and other configs will be in appropriate folders in config directory.