git-commit-id-plugin is a plugin quite similar to https://fisheye.codehaus.org/browse/mojo/tags/buildnumber-maven-plugin-1.0-beta-4 for example but as buildnumber only supports svn (which is very sad) and cvs (which is even more sad). This plugin makes basic repository information available through maven resources. This can be used to display "what version is this?" or "who has deployed this and when, from which branch?" information at runtime - making it easy to find things like "oh, that isn't deployed yet, I'll test it tomorrow" and making both testers and developers life easier. The data currently exported is like this (that's the end effect from the GitRepositoryState Bean): { "branch" : "testing-maven-git-plugin", "commitTime" : "06.01.1970 @ 16:16:26 CET", "commitId" : "787e39f61f99110e74deed68ab9093088d64b969", "commitUserName" : "Konrad Malawski", "commitUserEmail" : "[email protected]", "commitMessageFull" : "releasing my fun plugin :-) + fixed some typos + cleaned up directory structure + added license etc", "commitMessageShort" : "releasing my fun plugin :-)", "buildTime" : "06.01.1970 @ 16:17:53 CET", "buildUserName" : "Konrad Malawski", "buildUserEmail" : "[email protected]" } Note that the data is exported via maven resource filtering and is really easy to use with spring - which I've explained in detail in this readme https://github.com/ktoso/maven-git-commit-id-plugin