Maven war plugin copy arbitrary files - maven

I apologize that this is surely basic maven/war plugin stuff, but I'm totally not a maven user. I just have to hack this one thing into a project that is maven based.
What I need to do is to copy an (essentially arbitrary) directory and files into the root of my war. I need them to appear as resources available via HTTP when the war deploys.
I cannot simply put them in the "right place" in the source tree. This is because the files in question are actually the source files of my project. I realize this is a bit odd, but this is a documentation project, and I need to show the source and the effect all in the same war.
So, in the general case, how would I configure the maven war plugin to copy a given directory, along with it's contents, to the root of my war? (BTW, I have tried to make sense of the documentation of this tool, but it seems to be predicated on so much understanding of maven that it feels like I'll never understand it without learning maven first, and I'm a bit too pressed for time to do that just now!)
Many TIA
Toby.

You could try:
use the copy-resources plugin. Use the plugin to copy your source files under target prior to when the war is packaged.
or, configure the maven-war-plugin to include additional resources.

Thanks Drew, that got me where I needed to go. Bottom line, I added the sample pom fragment from the link you gave for copy-resources to my pom.xml with the following changes:
<outputDirectory>target/${project.name}-${project.version}/sources ...
<directory>src/main/java ...
I copied this from the link you gave, then edited the element to point at src/main/java, which picked up my files, and the outputDirectory to the aggregate target/${project.name}-${project.version}/sources . I found that ${project.name} mapped to the project, and the version came from ${project.version}, which seemed to resolve the last little bits of issue.
Thanks again.
Toby

Related

Can I use maven to add sources as part of my project?

I am using a dependency and I have some issues with it.
I could download the sources and include it as part of my project and then start modifying the source to help me debug my issue.
However, is there an easier way to do this, using maven ? I have the source-jars downloaded but I am not sure if I can then use these source jars and modify the code as well ?
I could in theory unbar the sources and add them to my source build path, but is there an easier way to accomplish this ?
I am using maven and IntelliJ.
Are you able to get a successful build of the dependency you're having issues with (in it's own project?).
If so, change the version, e.g. 1.2.3-CUSTOM-1, make the improvements, rebuild, and use it as a proper maven depdendency with <version>1.2.3-CUSTOM-1</version>.
This might seem a lot of work, but it's not really - you end up with a properly versioned jar.... having a "hacked" version of 1.2.3 jar is asking for all sorts of problems later.
On the plus side, you can share and deploy the -CUSTOM-1 jar if you need to, and you can keep versioning -CUSTOM-2, etc.
This is the "proper way" I would say.
As Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen wrote, source jars are read-only. You can setup debugger breakpoints in them, but you can't "write" in them
Either unjar the sourced jar or if you know it came from a git release tag, clone the original repository and checkout the correct tag
Make sure its sources compile
Bump up the version in case you know you are going to hack the source
On the right pane, use Maven projects / Plus icon to add sources and use the "m" Execute goal icon to build the sources in IDEA :

How to run plugin on maven dependency

I'm setting up a (java) maven project that depends on a library (Jettison, among others) that is in the Maven repo. Jettison, in turn, depends on stax. I need to run a tool (Jar Jar Links) on stax (to change the namespace). How do I alter the rules for a transitive dependency in a maven project? My transitive dependencies are being included in my target folder using the copy-dependencies goal (I assume this is how things are usually done). I assume that this is the point where the plugin would be run on the transitively-generated artifact.
Extra question: I don't need this at this point but how would I go about altering the source in the transitive dependency? I can get the jar of the source with mvn dependency:sources but, from there, I'm not sure what the right approach is.
Victory!
Seems at least two people are even more clueless about Maven than me so let me explain what I'm doing before I report the fix at the bottom of this post (spoiler alert: it looks to be a bug in JarJar).
Android uses Java but its missing a lot of the java core (specifically, javax classes). The Android DEX compiler (which converts .jars to Android .dex files) won't even allow you to compile things in the java.* or javax.* namespace because it'll (usually) break stuff. However, in some (many) cases, there are routines that you might want to include -- specifically because they are used by existing libraries. The most legendary is StAX, which is why Google posted an example of how to include it here in the Dalvik repo's wiki. The example uses JarJar... with ant. Transitive dependencies are not really an issue when you aren't using a repo so they are not addressed in the wiki.
I was able to get JarJar to run on my source with Maven but without changing the namespaces in the dependencies (and transitive dependencies), that's worthless. Hence my question.
I thought that the copy-dependencies plugin might be useful for... copying the dependencies and running a transforming plugin in the process. Copying dependencies is mentioned as a step in the official "Maven in 5 minutes" doc so it seemed like a good start but maybe the the people who wrote the official docs don't know how to use it :-) . Either way, it it didn't help -- there is no simple way I could see to transform the jars as it copies.
Using the verbose spew from Maven, I was able to see that Jar Jar was in fact processing my jars properly... and then throwing out the result. It would have packaged the converted classes from the transitive dependencies in my artifact with the rest of my code but, instead, it "Excluded" them. Jar Jar parameters are basically undocumented and most of the tags aren't even listed in the docs but all of the examples I could find use a section with wild-cards that tell it what classes to hold onto. At least I thought (think?) that's what the section is for. Instead, it seems to randomly throw out stuff. Basically, the section is busted. For example, I had:
<keep>
<pattern>com.example.**</pattern>
</keep>
...thinking that this would keep classes that began with com.example. Wrong. It keeps whatever the hell it wants. I tried a million things in that spot until one worked:
<keep>
<pattern>*.**</pattern>
</keep>
This only keeps the classes I wanted -- the classes it updated and the originals of the ones that it didnt touch. Note that ** doesn't even work. This is version 1.8 of the JarJar plugin (the version most poms Ive found use).
Back to work.

Exclude Reading/Replacing specific files in Maven Build

We are using maven for building the project. It's legacy and huge one.
We newly added few .keystore files to it's resources folder.
The problem is, once the build is done, the .keystore files are getting tampered [may be maven is trying to replace/search for some placeholders]. Since it's legacy one, the project structure is so much messed up and we don't have separate distributions or no other choice but to go with plain build.
What I want is, tell maven to copy these sort of files without touching them and keeping the build as usual like before.
Between, there's no explicit is mentioned in pom.xml, tried to doing with that as per this http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-resources-plugin/examples/include-exclude.html but it's messing up the project build.
I don't want to tamper the build, since it's legacy and huge one. We are using Ant plugin
Just switch off filtering for the respective <resource/> or add an <exclude/> for it.
After going through lot of sources, Found the solution http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-resources-plugin/examples/binaries-filtering.html
Thanks :)

Where in the Maven Standard Directory Layout should generated resources go?

I'd like to generate some resources (JavaHelp search index in this case), but I can't seen to see where those generate files should go to get into the jar. I put them in target/generated-sources, but they are ignored. Should it be target/classes?
/generated-sources directory is used by various tools generating sources (duh!), like xjc or wsdl2java. This directory is later included in the compilation phase.
/target/classes is everything that should be included in the final JAR, which answers your question. Also the contents of /src/main/resources is included, but this directory is typically part of version control and is not meant for generated artifacts.
It turns out that generated-source directories are not automatically included in the jar. However, Intellj assumes there are and treats them as such, hence my confusion.
You need to use the Maven build helper plugin to fix this issue, for example:
https://github.com/alexec/javahelp-skeleton/blob/master/pom.xml

Maven shipping scripts

I am completely new to Maven and come from an ant world. I am having lots of trouble something that might be really trivial.
I want to have a maven project that is made out of non-code items that I want to ship along my jars. These items are DDL scripts, installer scripts a couple of utility scripts, readmes etc.
I do not want to use "resources" in the corresponding java projects since I do not want them living in the actual product jars. I want them shipped as separate artifacts that just like any other jar.
It is acceptable to bundle them up in a jar or zip, etc.
Is there a way to do this?
Thanks!
Use the build helper plug-in to add additional artifacts to the Maven module.
Check out the answer to the following question
Ok, I found it and it was pretty simple. Just created a project added a simple pom with no plugin pacakging jar and I create the proper dir structure
src/main/resources/...
This builds it into a jar

Resources