Question

I have a multi module web app building with maven. We build the war as per normal and deploy and run on developer machines and local test servers using tomcat.

Then we want to deploy the application to the cloud. To do this we create a special version of tomcat which has all the libraries preloaded and a special version of the war which only has our code. Point here is tomcat is preloaded on the cloud server, the war is uploaded each time it is changed. Currently we are having to manually remove the dependencies from the built war.

What is the best way for maven to do this? Should I build a custom packaging type or maybe run some post build plugin to remove these wars? Or something else? I think the best way to activate this custom build is via a profile. I did try and remove these dependencies by setting them to scope = provided in the new profile but the transitive dependencies still made it into the war.

Answer 1

If you want to exclude all dependencies, you can use the war plugin’s packagingExcludes to do so:

    <plugin>
        <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>2.2</version>
        <configuration>
            <packagingExcludes>WEB-INF/lib/*.jar</packagingExcludes>
            ...
        </configuration>
    </plugin>

Specify this plugin inside a profile to only perform it for production.