With maven is it possible to have a top-level project who’s packaging type is “war” which will build itself and all of its dependent modules (packaged as jar) and have the build generate a project.war file?
Much of the documentation examples and other examples I’ve seen often use a top-level project with packaging type of “pom” and the project only serves the purpose of tying the modules together. Can I avoid this?
So basically I need something which is effectively like declaring a <module>my-module</module> for maven to build, and in that same POM, declaring a <dependency>...my-module's artifact...</dependency> on that same module which needs to be built. Maybe a plugin as someone already suggested?
Update: In other words (to simplify the problem): If I have project A and project B, where project A depends on project B – is there a way for me to execute a build on project A and also have it automatically build project B (and include project B as its dependency – creating projectA.war which contains projectB.jar)?
That’s not really what a top-level project is for. Your WAR project has dependencies, which are the artifacts (e.g. jars) that will be included in the WAR (in WEB-INF/lib) when you run ‘mvn package’. Your WAR project pom can have the top-level project as its parent, but it shouldn’t be the parent of its dependencies. You may want to have that top-level project be the parent of both the WAR project and of the JAR projects that are dependencies in the WAR.