Maven Profile Trigger

Profiles are Maven's way of supporting different runtime configurations in the build lifecycle. They can be activated in several different ways e.g. by a particular value of a system property. While you can trigger a profile by setting the respective system property in the mvn commandline e.g.
  

     mvn install -Dappserver=jboss

it is   n o t   possible to use a maven property defined inside the pom. That's not allowed because pom defined properties can themselves be changed inside a profile.
As you can imagine in a multi module project this fact can get extremely annoying: you execute multiple goals and always have to specify the same property again and again. Potentially you destroy the whole project state if you accidentally forget to provide it.
Fortunately there is a simple yet effective way to help you out of this situation: adding the required property to the  MAVEN_OPTS environment variable. It's that easy...