Sakai Maven Plugin

So this plugin has 2 functions:

sakai-component packaging. This is Sakai's own packaging type that gets deployed into the component folder
the deploy/deploy-exploded goal that deploys artifacts from the local maven repository into a copy of tomcat.

Testing Plugin

The Sakai project normaly binds to a released version of the plugin. To quickly test new versions you can tell maven to use a newer versions of the plugin on the command line with:

mvn org.sakaiproject.maven.plugins:sakai:1.4.4-SNAPSHOT:deploy-exploded

Releasing

This plugin is released to the OSS Sonatype repository using the maven release plugin. You will need to be setup with an account there and have a GPG key to sign the release. http://central.sonatype.org/pages/ossrh-guide.html

There is a relase profile which is not used by default but will be used when making the release. You can test that the release profile works ok for you by doing:

mvn -Prelease deploy

this will attempt to build and deploy a SNAPSHOT version of the maven Sakai plugin to the Sonatype OSS repository. If it all builds ok then you can attempt a local release, first have the release plugin update the versions and create the tag. Having -DpushChanges=false means that if the release fails for some reason you haven't tainted the central repository with the version increments.

mvn -DpushChanges=false release:prepare

Then if it all looks ok you can make the release to the Sonatype staging repository:

mvn -DlocalCheckout=true release:perform

because you didn't push the changes you need the -DlocalCheckout=true option. Once it's appeared in OSS Sonatype and all looks ok you need to push your changes.