Deploying to Nexus using Jenkins - maven

We currently have Jenkins jobs to build the infrastructure for our suite of products. This job invokes ant to package various jar files under our build directory.
i.e.
build
lib
common.jar
ldap.jar
filesplit.jar
rmiservice.jar
.
.
.
My question is what is the best way to implement this so that we can deploy the built jar files to Nexus in bulk? Or is the best/only way to do this is to have a pom.xml file with each artifact specified with a build.gradle or Jenkins pipeline?
Thoughts? Best approach? Any help would be appreciated :) Thanks

Their is apparently an official plugin to deploy to nexus from an ant task.
https://github.com/sonatype/nexus-ant-tasks/tree/master/nexus-staging-ant-tasks
Once your deployment works from command line, automate it with Jenkins. Don't try to multi task you would loose time.
If you consider that deploying to nexus could be an excuse to migrate to a modern build system and replace Ant, go for Gradle

Agree w/ #jf-meier; migrate to maven. It has many benefits, though it can be a heavy lift.
Nevertheless, aether-ant works well and acts as a good transition phase as well. Documented to work with Nexus.
We've used it extensively to help teams for years. It uses the same engine that is within maven itself.

Related

How to Deploy an artifact programmatically using Maven

I have a mission to develop an integration tool which allows from a source code folder to generate a WAR or OSGI Bundle and then deploys it in Tomcat or Karaf. I used Maven Embedder to create the artifacts, now my problem is how to configure my pom.xml to automatically deploy these artifacts.
on the internet I can't find any examples and also I'm new to the world of JEE and Maven.
please help me.
Find out how you can deploy artifacts to Tomcat or Karaf (without Maven).
Find out how you can deploy artifacts to Tomcat or Karaf programmatically.
Find a Maven plugin to use that deployment method.
The simplest solution would be to use something like the maven-resources-plugin to copy your built artifacts to the servers deployment directory but I am pretty sure that there are more sophisticated methods like http://tomcat.apache.org/maven-plugin-2.2/tomcat7-maven-plugin/deploy-only-mojo.html for deploying out of maven without plain file system mechanisms.
On a wider scale when working on problems like yours it always helps to take a step back and think about the abstract use case ("How to deploy something somewhere" followed by "How to deploy something somewhere programmatically") before going into detail and think about Tomcat or other application servers - and in most cases you will find out that there were hundreds of other who already had the same problem and solved it some way or the other.

What is Workflow management using Maven?

I have only little experience using maven with eclipse. One of the job descriptions which I received has "Workflow management using Maven" as a required skill. What does this mean ? What do they possibly expect?
I think they want you to correct them? :D
I'm not sure what they refer to. I would guess it relates to the developer workflow of creating and delivering software with eclipse (?) and maven.
So setting up a project from scratch is often done from an maven archetype (a project template if you like). A lot of open source frameworks offer archetypes to start with.
For existing projects you would check out the code from version control and import it into eclipse. the m2eclipse plugin is required to do that (but I think its quite common to have it)
Then there is building the software. Which is done through executing maven phases (which will then execute plugins). See maven-phases for more details. Maven phases have default plugins that execute (for example compile will run the compiler plugin).
So your workflow would look like this: you modify the files. compile them, test them, package them, deploy the artifacts into the maven repository. the maven install phase will store the artifacts in you local repository, the maven deploy phase will upload them into the company's repository.
From there the the files are installed. Yet you can use maven plugins to install the software into a application server. That depends on the traditions of the company.
I would not think of workflow as some strict step by step think like BPMN. Development is usually done with huge amounts of personal practices (are tests written in advance or while implementing, and so on).
Hope that will help :)

Is there any easy way to generate mave pom file from ant build

I have a ant build.xml file , how can i directly create a maven pom.xml which is exactly equivalent of build.xml file ? I know that I can create a maven project and move the folder of build.xml to appropriate folder of maven directories, But is there any automated way of doing this ?
ANT and MAVEN are different so there is probably no such complete automation really.
Still there are some attempts to automate it (see: https://github.com/ewhauser/ant2maven/blob/master/ant2maven.groovy and its forked repositories).
Another approach may be to create a pom.xml file and use https://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-antrun-plugin/ to include the ANT script in it.
The simple answer is no. There is no easy way to generate a POM.
In my opinion switching to Maven is best left to new projects with little or no legacy to defend. In short Maven is a highly opinionated build tool that follows a standardized build workflow. ANT, on the other, ANT is gloriously configurable... resulting in no two builds working the same way :-)
A secondary problem is that few ANT builds properly record the origin and version of their 3rd party dependencies...
In most cases you are better off keeping the existing ANT build logic and introduce dependency managment using a plugin like Apache ivy. This allows an ANT project to properly integrate with a Maven repository infrastructure. This further enables collaboration with other teams using alternative build tools like Maven, Gradle or SBT.
Related answers:
Migrating complex project from Ant to Maven - How to handle unusual folder structures?
Maven or Ivy? Which one is better with a system already in production? And the other differences?

Build Once, Deploy Anywhere, with Maven, Jenkins, and Artifactory

I'm in the latter stages of setting up a CI environment for my project. I'm using Maven, Jenkins and Artifactory Pro and can successfully build my project and deploy it's artifacts to Artifactory. I have also written a bash script to retrieve the resulting artifacts of a specific build from Artifactory and copy them somewhere.
The main part I'm missing right now is automated versioning. I've looked at enabling Artifactory release management, which is really cool, but involves the rebuilding of the project. I'm really trying to follow the mantra of 'Build Once, Deploy Anywhere', so any rebuilding is a no-no.
My question boils down to: Is there an automated way (either with one of the aforementioned tools, or a plugin) to handle versioning, without rebuilding an artifact?
Artifactory Pro allows you to easily extend Artifactory's behavior with your own plugins written in groovy. (https://www.jfrog.com/confluence/display/RTF/User+Plugins)
You can find here, an example of Promote extension, that will change your artifacts versions without the needs of new build.
You can find more usefully examples in the GitHub "artifactory-user-plugins" repository.

How to have different build task and dependency "on-demand" with Maven

Hi there i need some information or general tips on a problem with maven.
Context:
We just migrated one big eclipse project into 4 maven project. (Thats one step in the good direction!)
We were building that/those project with an ant script (build.xml) We were selecting the task to do "on-demand"
To keep it simple here are the 4 project : Core, Client, Server, Admin.
Each of those maven project build into a jar. This have been establish and it is working perfectly. Core is a dependency to Client and Server.
We use Jenkins-CI and Artifactory on a remote server.
Problem:
I need to create some kind of "parent project" that will build all those other maven project and add some task "on demand" that we were doing with an ant script.
Exemple: We want to build locally (So we don't use jenkins and artifactory on this side) for our developper so they can test manually their update (yes we have no test for now, we are working on a legacy system). On this build, we do not want to obfuscate the code or sign our jar..etc
We also want a "customer build" (The real release that we push on the server, so it does use jenkins and artifactory) That will add some task on some of the 4 project like obfuscating the code, signing the jar ..etc
For this "customer build", we need to be able to select our dependency of a library "on-the-fly" or more like "On demand". Our program is an extension to another software and all our customer don't use the same version. To make it simple the library "y" can be y-2.0.1.jar or y-2.0.2.jar.. etc
All of those "task" i need can be done in different maven-plugin with no problem.
Question: What would be a good practice to solve my problem. We would really like to get rid of our ant script. Also we are cleaning a big big dirty project so i would like a clean solution without a lots of duplicated stuff or lots of manually task to do each time we want to build either locally or on the remote server for our customer.
Idea: I though i could use different maven profile in all those 4 project as i saw there:
Ant to Maven - multiple build targets But i will have a seriously huge pom.xml for each project with lots of duplicated stuff so I really don't like this idea. I though we could have a parent maven project but this would contain no code so i think I'm wrong with this idea also.
Thank for answering and for your time!
Going with Maven Profiles is the right thing to do for this kind of customization. Then you'll probably have developerProfile and releaseProfile or such.
And yes, your poms will be big and complicated.
Looks like your demands are a little bit to much for what Maven can provide out-of-the-box, and it's not the best tool for doing highly-customized builds. Since (as I understand) you are on pretty early days with your new build infrastucture, I'd advice to look at Gradle. You could reuse your ant tasks and both Jenkins-CI and Artifactory work great with Gradle.

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