How do I add time-stamp information to Maven artifacts?

Question

I am upgrading a large build-system to use Maven2 instead of Ant, and we have two related requirements that I'm stuck on:

1. We need to generate a time-stamped artifact, so a part of the package phase (or wherever), instead of building

   project-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar
   

   we should be building

   project-1.0-20090803125803.jar
   

   (where the 20090803125803 is just a YYYYMMDDHHMMSS time-stamp of when the jar is built).

   The only real requirement is that the time-stamp be a part of the generated file's filename.

2. The same time-stamp has to be included within a version.properties file inside the generated jar.

This information is included in the generated pom.properties when you run, e.g., mvn package but is commented out:

#Generated by Maven
#Mon Aug 03 12:57:17 PDT 2009

Any ideas on where to start would be helpful! Thanks!

Answer 1

Maven versions 2.1.0-M1 or newer have built in special variable maven.build.timestamp.

<build>
  <finalName>${project.artifactId}-${project.version}-${maven.build.timestamp}</finalName>
</build>

See Maven documentation for more details.

---

For older Maven versions a look at maven-timestamp-plugin or buildnumber-maven-plugin.

If you use maven-timestamp-plugin, you can use something like this to manipulate resulting artifact name.

<build>
   <finalName>${project.artifactId}-${project.version}-${timestamp}</finalName>
</build>

And this configuration for buildnumber-maven-plugin should create a ${timestamp} property which contains the timestamp value. There doesn't seem to be a way to create the version.properties file directly with this plugin.

<configuration>
   <format>{0,date,yyyyMMddHHmmss}</format>
   <items>
      <item>timestamp</item>
   </items>

</configuration>

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