Does Maven's concept of snapshots of any use for CI/CD?

Question

1.9k Views Asked by Pavel Voronin At 04 April 2025 at 23:24

I understand that snapshot is something under development, i.e. 1.0-SNAPSHOT is something that will be eventually released as 1.0.

But why do I need it?

Here is the flow:

I develop the library with semantic versioning Major.Minor.Revision[.Build] model.
I explicitly define Major and Minor while Revision (or Build) is incremented automatically by CI/CD pipeline
After PR is accepted and gated build is successfully run new version is published to company's private repository.
In dependent project I specify either exact version or floating version Major.+.

Is there any place for SNAPSHOT here?

There are 1 best solutions below

**J Fabian Meier** · Answer 1

This is a huge topic. Let me comment on some points that are relevant in our company.

We build ear files that contain jars with large dependency trees. In development, you often need to make a fix deep down in the tree. If you use SNAPSHOT versions, everybody will automatically draw these changes in the next build. If you use build numbers, the results have to be propagated from bottom to top, i.e. if you have a dependency hierarchy A -> B -> C and you build a new version of C, you need a new version of B and then a new version of A. Alternatively, you can manage versions with dependencyManagement on highest level (the ear level, in our case) to avoid rebuilding everything after a bugfix change in jar C.
Our developers need to build "half features" to show them to our customers during development. These are usually build as SNAPSHOT versions and not put into the deployment pipeline. SNAPSHOT versions allow you to semantically distinguish these versions from those which are meant to go productive.
A distinction between SNAPSHOT and release versions can be used as a quick way to guess the quality of an artifact (if all artifacts have number x.y.z, which are good and which are bad?)
Build reproducibility is an important goal, but from the discussion with our developers I know that there a different opinions on this. Some developers value if version updates happen "automatically" - they say that "the newest version is always the right version, why should I do all these manual updates?"