Execute Maven plugin goal on parent module, but not on children

Solution 1:

As documented in the Plugins section of the pom reference:

Beyond the standard coordinate of groupId:artifactId:version, there are elements which configure the plugin or this builds interaction with it.

• inherited: true or false, whether or not this plugin configuration should apply to POMs which inherit from this one.

So just add <inherited>false</inherited> to the buildnumber-maven-plugin configuration to avoid inheritance in children POMs:

      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
        <artifactId>buildnumber-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>1.0-beta-3</version>
        <inherited>false</inherited>
        ...
      </plugin>

Solution 2:

You can add <inherited>false</inherited> to the plugin configuration to avoid inheritance in children POMs:

      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
        <artifactId>buildnumber-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>1.0-beta-3</version>
        <inherited>false</inherited>
        ...
      </plugin>

Or, if your plugin has multiple executions, you can control which executions are inherited and which are not by adding the inherited tag to the execution body:

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
    <executions>
      <execution>
        <id>parent-only</id>
        <phase>initialize</phase>
        <inherited>false</inherited>
        <configuration>
          <target>
            <echo message="Echoed only by this module."/>
          </target>
        </configuration>
        <goals>
          <goal>run</goal>
        </goals>
      </execution>
      <execution>
        <id>all-modules</id>
        <phase>initialize</phase>
        <inherited>true</inherited> <!-- Defaults to true, so you could leave this line out -->
        <configuration>
          <target>
            <echo message="Echoed in this module and each child module."/>
          </target>
        </configuration>
        <goals>
          <goal>run</goal>
        </goals>
      </execution>
    </executions>
  </plugin>

Solution 3:

There is a built-in maven option:

mvn --help
...
-N,--non-recursive    Do not recurse into sub-projects

Solution 4:

Just an addition to the great answers here: note that per-execution inheritance is broken in Maven 2: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNG-3959