Some questions on building Neo4j with Maven

Question

I'm doing a project with neo4j. I need to modify some lines of code because I want it to work differently than usual.

So it's necessary for me to build it with this command:

mvn clean install -DfullBuild

I'm new to Maven. I don't understand some things:

• Why do Maven download some files while building? I just want to compile my code, is there any reason to download anything?

• Is there any way to avoid compiling/running tests? Some of them fail when changing code and the build fails. And documentation? How can I avoid generating it?

• Why does it take sooo long to build? Every time I change a line it takes me like 30 minutes to build it again. I just want to compile some modules instead of all of them.

• I've seen that some modules has their own pom.xml file. Does it mean that I can build them separately to save time?

Thanks for any help given!

Answer 1

1) it's downloading all the dependencies (which are a lot). If you have snapshot dependencies they will be redownloaded on a daily basis.

2) add -DskipTests=true to your command line arguments

3) most of the build time is spent running the tests. Neo4j has a strict focus on quality hence a lot of tests. Also building the browser requires couple of steps to compress/package javascript, css and other stuff.

4) yes. If you change something in submodule xyz, just call mvn install -DskipTests=true from within that module.