Question

basically what I have is an application server running liferay portal.
and we also have custom portlets that have shared custom libraries as well as third party ones.
for instance dwr-3.0, several drools jar files, spring-webmvc, spring, etc.

the problem is that is a nightmare for server administration, because when there is a deploy somebody always forgets what version was in the server etc.

We use maven 2, and what I was thinking is to do something like a maven project that pulls the dependencies (using dependencyManagement) from the parent pom and the default goal is something like “unjar all the dependencies and jar them in a unique jar”.
that way we would have a unique jar with a standard version that is deployed along with the rest of the files instead of having to deploy.

Do you guys know how can I do that if it is at all possible?
I have been playing around with maven-assembly-plugin without much success. If assembly is the way to go, do you have an example to give me a kickstart?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

And finally the best solution was using maven-shade-plugin:

(snip)
    <build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-jar-plugin</artifactId>
            <configuration>
                <finalName>${artifactId}-${version}-tmp</finalName>
            </configuration>
        </plugin>
        <plugin>
            <artifactId>maven-shade-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>1.3.1</version>
            <executions>
                <execution>
                    <phase>package</phase>
                    <goals>
                        <goal>shade</goal>
                    </goals>
                    <configuration>
                        <shadedArtifactAttached>true</shadedArtifactAttached>
                        <shadedClassifierName>full</shadedClassifierName>
                        <artifactSet>
                            <excludes>
                                <exclude>classworlds:classworlds</exclude>
                                <exclude>junit:junit</exclude>
                                <exclude>jmock:*</exclude>
                                <exclude>org.apache.maven:lib:tests</exclude>
                                <exclude>log4j:log4j:jar:</exclude>
                            </excludes>
                        </artifactSet>
                        <filters>
                            <filter>
                                <artifact>*:*</artifact>
                                <excludes>
                                    <exclude>META-INF/*.SF</exclude>
                                    <exclude>META-INF/*.DSA</exclude>
                                    <exclude>META-INF/*.RSA</exclude>
                                </excludes>
                            </filter>
                        </filters>
                    </configuration>
                </execution>
            </executions>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>

(snip)

What is awesome about shade plugin is that it warns you when you are including classes that are overlapping (an example is the spring jar (the full one) with aopalliance classes)