Spring Maven clean error – The requested profile “pom.xml” could not be activated because it does not exist

The warning message

[WARNING] The requested profile "pom.xml" could not be activated because it does not exist.

means that you somehow passed -P pom.xml to Maven which means “there is a profile called pom.xml; find it and activate it”. Check your environment and your settings.xml for this flag and also look at all <profile> elements inside the various XML files.

Usually, mvn help:effective-pom is also useful to see what the real POM would look like.

Now the error means that you tried to configure Maven to build Java 8 code but you’re not using a Java 8 runtime. Solutions:

1. Install Java 8
2. Make sure Maven uses Java 8 if you have it installed. JAVA_HOME is your friend
3. Configure the Java compiler in your pom.xml to a Java version which you actually have.

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