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mvnr: recursive mvn command runner

I recently had an issue with many Maven repositories being part of the same project source code, while not sharing a common aggregate pom. Although the rationale behind a setup like this is often well justified, that does not make it any easier for developers working on source code across such a scattered strucutre. With this in mind I decided to create a node command line tool which recursively runs any supplied maven command on all maven projects found under the current working directory. MVNR does an honest attempt at figuring out which of the known maven artifacts need to be built first. In other words mvnr tries to figure out which of the artifacts under the current working directory needs to be built first in order for other artifacts to successfully be built with these as dependencies, recursively.

mvnr

mvnr is available from npm by issuing the following command:

npm install -g mvnr

After this you can run maven commands as you normally would by issuing the ‘mvnr’ command, and mvnr will figure out what directories it needs to run them on.

mvnr clean install

caveat

since mvnr uses ‘mvn -f’, which some plugins unfortunately do not respect, you may have pom configurations which have plugins using relative paths which assume cwd. This will not work very well.

• This has been proven to be true with the protostuff maven plugin
  in these cases it would be better if mvnr did a cd to the pom.xml path, but I have decided not to do it like this, as -f really should be respected.