Hi all, I'm confused about the use of maven in development and production environments - I'm sure it's something simple that I'm missing. Grateful for any help..

I set up maven inside eclipse on my local machine and wrote some software. I really like how it's made things like including dependent jars very easy.

So that's my development environment. But now I want to release the project to production on a remote server. I've searched the documentation, but I can't figure out how it's supposed to work or what the maven best practice is.. Are you supposed to:

a) Also be running maven on your production environment, and upload all your files to your production environment and rebuild your project there? (Something in me baulks at the idea of rebuilding 'released' code on the production server, so I'm fairly sure this isn't right..)

b) use mvn:package to create your jar file and then copy that up to production? (But then what of all those nice dependencies? Isn't there a danger that your tested code is now going to be running against different versions of the dependent jars in the production environment, possibly breaking your code? Or missing a jar..?)

c) Something else that I'm not figuring out..

Thanks in advance for any help!