Speed-up and secure your Maven builds with Maven Daemon

You can speed-up Maven builds considerably by using Maven Daemon.

Here is how I installed it on Ubuntu Linux:

  1. Make sure you have a Java Development Kit installed.

  2. Set the JAVA_HOME environment variable to point to your JDK by creating a file /etc/profile.d/java.sh with this content:

    #!/bin/sh
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-21-openjdk-amd64

  3. Download Maven Daemon.

  4. Unpack it into /opt

  5. Make it available in PATH:

    $ cd /usr/bin
$ sudo ln -s ../../opt/maven-mvnd-1.0.2-linux-amd64/bin/mvnd .
$ sudo ln -s mvnd mvn

You can configure IntelliJ IDEA to use it by setting Maven home path to /opt/maven-mvnd-1.0.2-linux-amd64. You need to do this for all existing Maven projects you have. Also make sure that the registry setting maven.use.scripts is true.

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How to run exec-maven-plugin only if a file is not up-to-date

In my Maven build, I use exec-maven-plugin to run an external tool for Java code generation. In this case the flatbuffers compiler (flatc).

By default, flatc always runs, so you always get a new .java file. This will always trigger Java compiler to run, which will in turn always trigger jar packaging to run, etc. I would like flatc to only run if it’s source file is updated, so I can get a properly incremental build and avoid needlessly recompiling.

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