Question

What is the Maven approach to deal with config files that will be eventually located outside the generated .war/.ear?

I have some config files that during development are in a common-configuration module which is a dependency of my webapp module, but I want some files to be located at different locations during deployment.

Answer 1

You can use the maven-assembly-plugin:

<plugins>
    <plugin>
        <artifactId>maven-assembly-plugin</artifactId>
        <configuration>
            <descriptors>
                <descriptor>src/main/assembly/description.xml</descriptor>
            </descriptors>
        </configuration>
    </plugin>
</plugins>

the file description.xml should look something like this:

<assembly>
    <id></id>
    <includeBaseDirectory>false</includeBaseDirectory>
    <formats>
        <format>zip</format>
        <format>tar</format>
    </formats>
    <fileSets>
        <fileSet>
            <directory>../YourProject/${project.build.directory}</directory>
            <outputDirectory>/binaries</outputDirectory>
            <includes>
                <include>YourProject-${version}.war</include>
            </includes>
        </fileSet>
        <fileSet>
            <directory>src/main/release/docs</directory>
            <outputDirectory>/docs</outputDirectory>
        </fileSet>
    </fileSets>
</assembly>

During deployment you can untar or unzip the generated file. The content of the tar/zip-file will look something like this:

/binaries/YourProject-1.0.war
/docs/readme.txt
/docs/documentation.doc