How to transform web.xml during packaging with maven? - maven

Question

I am porting an ant script to maven, and I am stuck on transforming my web.xml.
My web.xml has the following security constraint set to NONE during development, and to CONFIDENTIAL for the war that is produced for the production server.
<security-constraint>
<web-resource-collection>
<web-resource-name>HTTPSOnly</web-resource-name>
<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</web-resource-collection>
<user-data-constraint>
<transport-guarantee>NONE</transport-guarantee>
</user-data-constraint>
</security-constraint>
I use an XSL script to process web.xml file which is called from ant. I want maven to produce war file where the XSL has been applied to the web.xml and the transformed web.xml is used in the generated war.
I know about the maven XSL plugin and the concept of maven profiles but I am struggling to put it all together and I am not sure what the right maven way is for dealing with situation.

Answer 1

There are many ways you can achieve this. Probably the simplest way is to use maven-antrun-plugin http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-antrun-plugin/ and call your existing ant task
Other ways I know is to use a variable / placeholder and Maven filtering (variable substitution), have a look at: http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-assembly-plugin/examples/single/filtering-some-distribution-files.html

Answer 2

The Maven way is to use filtering.
Example below of regular web.xml filtering, without xsl:
<build>
<plugins>
<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
<configuration>
<webResources>
<webResource>
<directory>${basedir}/src/main/webapp/WEB-INF</directory>
<includes>
<include>web.xml</include>
</includes>
<targetPath>WEB-INF</targetPath>
<filtering>true</filtering>
</webResource>
</webResources>
</configuration>
</plugin>
</plugins>
<filters>
<filter>src/main/filters/filter-${env}.properties</filter>
</filters>
<resources>
<resource>
<directory>src/main/resources</directory>
<filtering>true</filtering>
</resource>
</resources>
</build>
If you insist on xsl, you could use Maven xml plugin, working from the base of the example:
<build>
<plugins>
...
<plugin>
<groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
<artifactId>xml-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<executions>
<execution>
<goals>
<goal>transform</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
</executions>
<configuration>
<transformationSets>
<transformationSet>
<dir>src/main/xml</dir>
<stylesheet>src/main/stylesheet.xsl</stylesheet>
</transformationSet>
</transformationSets>
</configuration>
</plugin>
...
</plugins>
</build>

Answer 3

I solved my problem my setting up a prod profile with the pom.xml for the web app, with the following plugins in it. This works for me because when the project is imported into eclipse I really don't want anything fancy to happen and I want everything to work out of the box the developer machine. It is not shown below but I also added a call to NodeJS to build the javascript front end using RequireJS at the generate-sources phase.
<plugin>
<groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
<artifactId>xml-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<version>1.0</version>
<executions>
<execution>
<phase>prepare-package</phase>
<goals>
<goal>transform</goal>
</goals>
<configuration>
<transformationSets>
<transformationSet>
<dir>src/main/webapp/WEB-INF</dir>
<includes>
<include>web.xml</include>
</includes>
<stylesheet>src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/web.xsl</stylesheet>
</transformationSet>
</transformationSets>
</configuration>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>
<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
<configuration>
<webXml>target/generated-resources/xml/xslt/web.xml</webXml>
<archiveClasses>true</archiveClasses>
<warSourceExcludes>META-INF/context.xml</warSourceExcludes>
<packagingExcludes>
**/**/context.xml
</packagingExcludes>
</configuration>
</plugin>