Question

I have 2 Maven web projects A and B. B contains some common parts and A depends on B.

In A’s pom.xml I have:

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>com.mygroup</groupId>
        <artifactId>B</artifactId>
        <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
        <type>war</type>
        <scope>compile</scope>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>2.0.2</version>
            <configuration>
                <source>1.5</source>
                <target>1.5</target>
            </configuration>
        </plugin>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>2.1.1</version>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>

I have 2 problems:

1. When making some changes in B, if I run a maven build on A I don’t see the changes in the resulting exploded archive.

2. Trying to deploy A from Eclipse does not work – the contents of B are not included in the resulting war/exploded archive.

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

Well, if you changes stuff in B, you have to re-install it into your local maven repo (mvn install) for other local projects that have it as dependency to receive the latest modifications.

When building a maven project it’s best if you build it using Maven (like with commands such as mvn package) and not using some other building tool (such as Eclipse). If you wanna build it a la Maven but from the comfort of your Eclipse GUI, you can istall m2_eclipse plugin from :

http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/installing-m2eclipse.html

which integrates Maven with Eclipse. Then, when you rigth click on your project in Eclipse, under the “Run…” options you’ll have the one that allows your to Maven build it, redirecting all console output to the Eclipse console window.

And as a final note, in a setup such as the one aboce, ideally you’d create a parent Maven project (packaged as “pom”) which has as child projects B and A (in that order). This way if you’ve modified stuff in both projects and you want everything to be build with the latest modifs, you can just do a maven install on the parent pom and Maven will take care of everything.