Question

I have been trying to convert a web project that produces a war file to maven. my existing project structure is as follows –

MyWebProject
|
— WEB-INF/src – contains a bunch of packages like com.myweb.client, com.myweb.server etc
— WEB-INF/test – contains 1 package com.myweb.tests
— web-scripts – contains bunch of scripts (just a folder; not on classpath)
— misc-files1 – contains misc files sets 1
— misc-files2 – similar to above

presently a war file is being created using ant script with the resulting war file structure as follows

myweb.war
– Meta-INF (only contains MANIFEST.MF)
– WEB-INF
– classes
– com.myweb.client
– com.myweb.server etc.
– web-scripts
– misc-files1
– misc-files2

i created a basic maven project using simple-artifact and added my packages. i am using maven assembly plugin to generate the war file and using filesets to filter. but my resultant war file is no where close to what i get with ant. here is a shortened version of my assembly.xml file

<assembly xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-assembly-plugin/assembly/1.1.2" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-assembly-plugin/assembly/1.1.2 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/assembly-1.1.2.xsd">

  <id>assembler</id>
  <formats>
    <format>war</format>
  </formats>
  <includeBaseDirectory>false</includeBaseDirectory>

<dependencySets>
<dependencySet/>
</dependencySets>

<fileSets>

    <fileSet>
        <directory>src/main/java</directory>
        <outputDirectory>WEB-INF</outputDirectory>
        <includes>
        <include>**</include>
        </includes>        
    </fileSet>

    <fileSet>
        <directory>es</directory>
        <outputDirectory>resources1</outputDirectory>
        <includes>
        <include>**</include>
        </includes>        
    </fileSet>
    <fileSet>
        <directory>resources2</directory>
        <outputDirectory>resources2</outputDirectory>
        <includes>
        <include>**/*</include>
        </includes>        
    </fileSet>
    <fileSet>           
    <fileSet>
        <directory>test</directory>
        <outputDirectory>WEB-INF</outputDirectory>
        <includes>
        <include>**</include>
        </includes>        
    </fileSet>

  </fileSets>


</assembly>

To create a custom war, is assembly plugin the right approach. I can always include my ant script in pom using maven-antrun-plugin, but i want to avoid using ant if possible. any suggestions.

Answer 1

You should be using maven-war-plugin for this.