- SNAPSHOT is a special version that indicates a current development copy. Unlike regular versions, Maven checks for a new SNAPSHOT version in a remote repository for every build.
- Now data-service team will release SNAPSHOT of its updated code every time to repository, say data-service: 1.0-SNAPSHOT, replacing an older SNAPSHOT jar.
- Basically, while developing a large scale application, the process involves a series of changes to be made in the application till it is confirmed to be ready as a final release. Because, there could be multiple teams working on an application across different set of modules.
- Consider 2 teams A & B working on 2 different modules and say team B will be dependent on the services provided by team A. Say team A is involved in working on some major critical fixes and those fixes will be checked in every day. So team B has to be notified in a way that there are still some pending work by team A and the final version has not yet been released by the team A. This is where the maven’s SNAPSHOT comes into the picture.
- Snapshot is a special version which indicates the current development copy of the project which is being worked on. For each build, maven always checks out for a SNAPSHOT of the project.
- Hence, whenever maven finds a newer SNAPSHOT of the project, it downloads and replaces the older .jar file of the project in the local repository.
- Snapshot version always gets some updates/changes being made on the project. Also, Snapshot should exist only during development phase and it will not be having a release version. This implies that the build of the project will be changed at any time and it is still under the development process.
Snapshot vs Version :
In case of Version, if Maven once downloaded the mentioned version, say data-service:1.0, it will never try to download a newer 1.0 available in repository. To download the updated code, data-service version is be upgraded to 1.1.
In case of SNAPSHOT, Maven will automatically fetch the latest SNAPSHOT
(data-service:1.0-SNAPSHOT) every time app-ui team build their project.