Question

Apologies if this is covered elsewhere, I’m afraid I couldn’t find an answer to this particular trivial question.

I have a maven project which references and builds 4 sub projects (as bundles). I have set the dependencies between the sub-projects correctly and ultimately I get 4 different .jar files build built:

• parentproj/sub1/target/sub1.jar
• parentproj/sub2/target/sub2.jar
• parentproj/sub3/target/sub3.jar
• parentproj/sub4/target/sub4.jar

My question is, how do I set-up mu parent build so that when I build from the main .POM file, all 4 jars are placed in “/parentproj/target/…”?

An additional question is, how do I also build a xxxx-ALL.jar (that merges the contents of these 4 bundles)?

Answer 1

Just use the Maven Assembly plugin with the “dir” format to put them all in a folder, and the “jar” format to group them into a jar.

Some more details:

1. You start with your maven projects (let’s call them subprojects)
2. Create a new maven project (pom packaging) that aggregates all the subprojects using < module > tags
3. Put in the assembly plugin into your pom.xml file (see below)
4. Create the correct assembly.xml file (see below)

pom.xml file:

<plugin>
    <artifactId>maven-assembly-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.2.1</version>
    <executions>
        <execution>
                <id>distro-assembly</id>
            <phase>package</phase>
            <goals>
                <goal>single</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
                <appendAssemblyId>false</appendAssemblyId>
                    <finalName>somefolder</finalName>
                    <attach>false</attach>
                    <descriptors>
                    <descriptor>assembly.xml</descriptor>
                    </descriptors>
                <phase>package</phase>
            </configuration>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

assembly.xml file:

<assembly
xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-assembly-plugin/assembly/1.1.2"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-assembly-plugin/assembly/1.1.2 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/assembly-1.1.2.xsd">
<id>SomeName</id>
<formats>
    <format>dir</format>
</formats>
<includeBaseDirectory>true</includeBaseDirectory>
<baseDirectory></baseDirectory>

<fileSets>
    <fileSet>
        <directory>appfiles</directory>
        <includes>
            <include>**</include>
        </includes>
        <outputDirectory>.</outputDirectory>
    </fileSet>
</fileSets>

<moduleSets>
    <moduleSet>
        <!-- useAllReactorProjects must be false if the assembly's run on the project with the module list -->
        <useAllReactorProjects>false</useAllReactorProjects>
        <includeSubModules>false</includeSubModules>

        <binaries>
            <includeDependencies>true</includeDependencies>
            <outputDirectory>bundle</outputDirectory>
            <unpack>false</unpack>
        </binaries>
    </moduleSet>
</moduleSets>