如何使Maven yuicompressor和tomcat插件发挥出色

Question

I'd like to compress all of my javascript files and aggregate them using YUICompressor, and I saw that there was a maven plugin to allow me to do this. I got it working for the most part.

I am also using the Mojo tomcat plugin as well. When i go to run the tomcat:run goal, tomcat does not read from the target's output directory (this is where the YUI compressor put my javascript files) - but rather, it reads from the actual source files in my "src/main/ webapp/scripts" directory. Of course, the aggregated javascript file (all.js) is not there.

I have a few questions.

1. How can I get the tomcat plugin to read the target's output folder that the yui compressor plugin created?

2. Do I have to run the yui compressor maven goal every time I want to update my javascript files during development?

3. Is there a better way to achieve this? Essentially, my end goal is to be able to develop JavaScript and test my source files in development mode, but I want to compress and aggregate the files and use the all.js script when the application is running in production mode.

While the Rails people have certainly figured this out, this seems to be a non-trivial thing to do with Maven and Spring.

I would appreciate any and all assistance on how I can get this running correctly. Thanks!

Answer 1

I was just investigating this very problem and found my answer by looking at the plugin documentation .

mvn tomcat:run - Runs the current project as a dynamic web application using an embedded Tomcat server.

What this means in practice is that the package execution phase has not been reached when the embedded tomcat runs.

The answer is to instead use:

mvn tomcat:run-war - Runs the current project as a packaged web application using an embedded Tomcat server.

This allows the maven build to get as far as packaging the WAR file and therefore allows the yuicompressor-maven-plugin to do what it needs to before the embedded tomcat starts up.

Answer 2

As for having to run it every time, you should attach the run of the yui plugin to the "generate-sources" execution phase.

Add the following to your plugin (the important part is the "phase" element to attach it to the lifecycle):

  <plugin>
    <groupId>net.alchim31.maven</groupId>
    <artifactId>yuicompressor-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <executions>
      <execution>
        <phase>generate-sources</phase>
        <goals>
          <goal>compress</goal>
        </goals>
      </execution>
    </executions>  
    <configuration>...</configuration>      
  </plugin>

This way the plugin will run every build during the generate-sources phase. So any time you change your java scripts which you have configured the plugin for, the output .js file will be updated as soon as you run something like:

mvn compile
mvn test
mvn install
mvn package

and so forth.

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The above does cause the minified (and possibly aggregated) files to be created earlier in the lifecycle but tomcat:run cannot find them!