Wierdness with Maven's site-deploy and Hudson

So, for the past five months or so, I've been working on porting some Java projects to Maven and the Ultimate Enterprise Java Build System.

A quick aside, Sonar is a very underrated tool. You should try it. I find the reporting very easy to use and very handy for working through potential coding mistakes in the legacy code I've been working with.

One of those Java projects is a large multi-module Maven build. It has five different modules, three Jar modules, a War module and *gasp* an Ear module. It's been a bit of a beast to get going, but it seems to be working just fine.

On Monday, I began to perform releases to move from Maven SNAPSHOTs to actual real version numbers. Ah, the joys of SCM release management. Thankfully, all of this pain ends up being worth it to easily tag and lock the code down using the maven-release-plugin. There were a couple of bumps, but it wasn't bad.

The fun began when I built my Hudson jobs to perform release builds. These jobs simply pulled the tagged release and performed the following goals:

clean install site-deploy

Obviously, I used Hudson's deploy step for the artifacts rather than Maven's. And everything was fine, until I got this:

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ERROR] BUILD ERROR
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Failed to resolve artifact.

Oops, what's that about? A little more background. This particular maven build was a multimodule build to create jar, war and ear files. The artifact it couldn't resolve was the first jar it built! Scanning the log file, it became clear that the job was not installing the built jar to the repository.

I don't know why that is, and am not certain if it's even worth opening a trouble ticket since the fix ended up being very simple. It seems that site-deploy was causing issues with the flow of the job within Hudson. By removing site-deploy the build ended up being successful. The jar was compiled, tested and installed before the next module's build was invoked.

I still wanted to build the site, so I investigated the M2 Extra Steps Plugin. This tool allows you to add multiple maven steps before and after the main job. I added the site-deploy goal to run after the main install goal and the sites were generated!