Question

As far as I’ve read, the dev:watch command of apache karaf should help developing osgi bundles in such way that I don’t have to manually update a bundle everytime I make changes to the sourcecode of that bundle.

I tried this, with one simple bundle which only consists of a Activator class.
I am using maven for development.

import org.osgi.framework.BundleActivator;
import org.osgi.framework.BundleContext;

public class Activator implements BundleActivator {

public void start(BundleContext context) {
    System.out.println("Starting the bundle");
}

public void stop(BundleContext context) {
    System.out.println("Stopping the bundle");
}
}

I installed the bundle using the karaf command:

osgi:install mvn:my.groupId/my.artifactId

then I started the bundle using osgi:start <id of my bundle>

then I started monitoring for this bundle using dev:watch --start <id of my bundle>

Karaf tells me that it monitors my bundle.

Then I wanted to test if the bundle will be updated automatically if I make changes to the source code and rebuild my bundle.
So I changed the System.out.println()'s of the activator class and built my rebuild my bundle using mvn clean install.

Shouldn’t the bundle updates itself now? When I take a look at the karaf console I see no changes until I update the bundle manually using osgi:update (which I want to avoid, using dev:watch) …

What am I doing wrong here?

Answer 1

After some hours I found the source of error.
Even if the bundle is already a SNAPSHOT version, it is not sufficient to install the bundle using osgi:install mvn:<groupID>/<artifactID> but you have to use the <version> too in the bundle URL: osgi:install mvn:<groupID>/<artifactID>/<version> ,where <version> corresponds to the version tag specified in the pom.xml. It has to be a snapshot version like “1.0-SNAPSHOT”.