Maven: The Definitive Guide

Summary

When used judiciously, profiles can make it very easy to customize a build for different platforms. If something in your build needs to define a platform-specific path for something like an application server, you can put these configuration points in a profile that is activated by an operating system parameter. If you have a project that needs to produce different artifacts for different environments, you can customize the build behavior for different environments and platforms via profile-specific plugin behavior. Using profiles, builds can become portable. There is no need to rewrite your build logic to support a new environment; just override the configuration that needs to change and share the configuration points that can be shared.