Question

I have a maven project , which needs to copy webapp/WEB-INF/ resources from another maven project which is packaged as a war .
How do I do it ?
PLease suggest

Answer 1

As Bittrance said, you should use the maven dependency plugin.

The better way is to create project that include all your shared resources, probably a type zip, which is build up with the assembly plugin. This is the good “maven way”. It’s a better solution than unpacking a war.

Then, refer it

    <dependency>
        <groupId>com.mygroup/groupId>
        <artifactId>my-dependencies</artifactId>
        <version>1.0.0</version>
        <type>zip</type>
    </dependency>

Next, you use the maven dependency plugin to unpack your resources, in the directory of your choice (probably WEB-INF/ ?)

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-dependency-plugin</artifactId>
    <executions>
       <execution>
           <id>unpack-cfg-test-resources</id>
           <goals>
                <goal>unpack-dependencies</goal>
           </goals>
           <phase>resources</phase>
              <configuration>
                <outputDirectory>${project.build.directory}/WEB-INF/</outputDirectory>
                                <includeArtifacIds>my-resources</includeArtifacIds>
                <excludeTypes>pom</excludeTypes>
                <excludeTransitive>true</excludeTransitive>
            </configuration>
        </execution>
     </executions>
 </plugin>

I’m not realy sure of this code snippet (written for another purpose), but this is an example.
For more information, please follow this link : http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-dependency-plugin/

If you can’t shared a common-project including your files, you can unpack war including only ftl (or whatever you want), but it’s not a realy clean solution 😉

There is a lot of posts that deal with this subject :
Unzip dependency in maven
…
Just try with the keywords maven-dependency-plugin, unpack 🙂

Hope that will help you.