Release Candidate is a Maven plugin developed by smartcode ltd to make integrating Maven projects with Continuous Delivery pipelines a little bit easier.
The plugin allows your build server to read the current version of a Maven project and update it automatically as part of the build process to include any additional metadata, such as:
- an identifier of the commit that triggered the build
- a current timestamp
- a build number
- and pretty much anything else
This also means that you can:
- use any versioning strategy you like for your release candidates (and SNAPSHOTs for local development)
- control the version of your release candidate and manage it in one place - the pom file
- easily integrate with your CI server (such as Jenkins, TeamCity and others)
- do all this without the Maven Release Plugin
You’re welcome ;-)
Read next: Controlling the version number (2 minute read)