How to package an assembly in Maven by moving resources out of the war? - maven

Question

Our project is set up to package a WAR and this works great for local development:
<plugin>
<artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
<version>2.3</version>
<executions>
<execution>
<id>package-war</id>
<phase>package</phase>
<goals>
<goal>war</goal>
</goals>
...
Included in this war, is a mapper file and logback file used by the application, which lives under: src/main/resources/logback.xml and /src/main/resources/mappers/our-mapper.xml.
In building the war, these files get sent where we expect and want them to be, under our.war/WEB-INF/classes/logback.xml and our.war/WEB-INF/classes/mappers/our-mapper.xml
When we package our assembly to hand off for deployment, we need to have these files separated out of the war, which we do using our assembly descriptor:
<assembly>
<formats>
<format>tar.gz</format>
</formats>
<includeBaseDirectory>false</includeBaseDirectory>
<files>
<file>
<source>target/${build.finalName}.war</source>
<outputDirectory>${tomcat-instance}/webapps</outputDirectory>
</file>
<file>
<source>src/main/resources/logback.xml</source>
<outputDirectory>${tomcat-instance}/resources/</outputDirectory>
</file>
</files>
<fileSets>
<fileSet>
<directory>src/main/resources/mapper</directory>
<outputDirectory>${tomcat-instance}/resources/mapper/</outputDirectory>
<includes>
<include>**/*</include>
</includes>
</fileSet>
</fileSets>
</assembly>
And configured in Maven with:
<plugin>
<artifactId>maven-assembly-plugin</artifactId>
<configuration>
<descriptors>
<descriptor>src/main/resources/our-assembly.xml</descriptor>
</descriptors>
</configuration>
<executions>
<execution>
<id>make-assembly</id>
<phase>package</phase>
<goals>
<goal>single</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>
This constructs the assembly, but my concern is the logback.xml and mappers/our-mapper.xml files are still contained inside the war which is contained inside the assembly.tar.gz.
Is it possible to keep the configuration where the war outside the assembly contains the .xml files as it already does, but also have the war that goes inside the assembled .tar.gz assembly exclude these same files so they don't appear twice on the classpath?
Thanks in advance for any help.

Answer 1

You've probably found a solution or workaround to this problem now - however, I was intrigued to know whether this was possible so I created a small test project with the same file structure as you described.
I managed to get this project to build out the two war files - with the one outside the assembly containing the .xml files, and the one inside the assembly excluding the .xml files. I achieved this by creating an additional assembly that builds a second temporary war file which explicitly excludes the .xml files. Then the existing assembly includes this new war file, rather than the default war.
The new assembly war-assembly.xml looks like this:
<assembly>
<id>temp</id>
<formats>
<format>war</format>
</formats>
<includeBaseDirectory>false</includeBaseDirectory>
<fileSets>
<fileSet>
<directory>target/${build.finalName}</directory>
<outputDirectory>/</outputDirectory>
<includes>
<include>**/*</include>
</includes>
<excludes>
<exclude>**/logback.xml</exclude>
<exclude>**/mapper/*</exclude>
</excludes>
</fileSet>
</fileSets>
</assembly>
The existing assembly is then modified to include the new war file:
<assembly>
<formats>
<format>tar.gz</format>
</formats>
<includeBaseDirectory>false</includeBaseDirectory>
<files>
<file>
<source>target/${build.finalName}-temp.war</source>
<outputDirectory>${tomcat-instance}/webapps</outputDirectory>
<destName>target/${build.finalName}.war</destName>
</file>
<file>
<source>src/main/resources/logback.xml</source>
<outputDirectory>${tomcat-instance}/resources/</outputDirectory>
</file>
</files>
<fileSets>
<fileSet>
<directory>src/main/resources/mapper</directory>
<outputDirectory>${tomcat-instance}/resources/mapper/</outputDirectory>
<includes>
<include>**/*</include>
</includes>
</fileSet>
</fileSets>
</assembly>
And then the pom.xml is modified to reference the new assembly before the existing assembly.
<descriptors>
<descriptor>src/main/resources/war-assembly.xml</descriptor>
<descriptor>src/main/resources/our-assembly.xml</descriptor>
</descriptors>
That seemed to work ok. It did leave the -temp war file lying around in the target folder which could potentially be removed to save any confusion.