Question

I have a quite specific problem.
I created a webapp and want to have a jar build of the classes additionally to the web war.
No problem, I did that by:

    <plugin>
      <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
      <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
      <version>2.2</version>
      <configuration>
        <attachClasses>true</attachClasses>
      </configuration>
    </plugin>

By that also the resources from src/main/resources go into the jar. But as these resources are only for this web application, I don’t want them in the jar. I could move them to the webapp src folder, but I need filtering on the properties file, so it has to be a resources folder and therefore gets included by a war/jar build.

<resources>
  <resource>
    <directory>src/main/resources</directory>
    <filtering>true</filtering>
  </resource>
</resources>

I tried to exclude them by configuring the maven-jar-plugin:

  <plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-jar-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.4</version>
    <configuration>
      <excludes>
        <exclude>**properties</exclude>
      </excludes>
    </configuration>
  </plugin>

Works fine for a singular jar build by jar:jar, but unfortunatly not for the jar build done by the install phase.

Is there a way to apply these configurations to the maven-war-plugin?

I know I could extend the configuration by adding executions for building a jar, installing it locally and for deploying it to a remote repository, but that’s a little mess up.

Any help is welcome.

Answer 1

One way to do this would be by moving the Java sources to a separate project, which you then include in the WAR project as a dependency. This way, you have control over what goes into the JAR file and you could keep the other files in the WAR project, apply filtering etc.

I found that separating functionality into fine-grained projects is often the best way to solve things instead of setting up multiple plugins with complex configuration to do the same. If it requires a complex setup, it’s probably the wrong way. Try to keep it simple 🙂