Deploying a jar file and external resource files with Maven

Question

I am new to Maven and wanted to automate some build steps by automatically deploying several files and folders to the production environment:

my-app-0.7.0-jar-with-dependencies.jar (main application file)
conf.properties (configuration file that can be edited on the fly)
files_folder (folder that contains html, css etc. that can be edited on the fly)

My project structure look like this:

src
   main 
      java
      resources (contains resources that should be included in the .jar)
conf.properties.jar 
files_folder 

.

I started by adding <resources> element in the pom.xml

<resources>
    <resource>
        <directory>.</directory>
        <includes>
            <include>conf.properties</include>
            <include>files_folder/**/*.*</include>
        </includes>
        <targetPath>..</targetPath>
    </resource>
</resources>

This moves conf.properties and files_folder to the target directory and this is fine (I can copy .jar, conf.properties and files_folder and run them).

However these files are not moved to the local repository in C:\\Users\\my_name\\.m2\\... or external repositories (in install and deploy phases).

My thinking is that these resource should be moved to the repositories because:

• they are necessary for the program to run
• it would be possible to rollback to any previous version very fast (just locate the version folder and everything you need would be there; it would not be so easy if conf.properties and files_folder would not be automatically included in there)

So the main questions are:

1. Is this line of thinking reasonable?
2. If it is reasonable, how is it possible to include these external resources in the repositories?

Answer 1

Like other response I'd suggest you need to look at a continuous integration approach. I have had good experience working with Jenkins before. It's free, and comes with a lot of functionatlity. It also has a large community that have developed a range of plugins:

https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Meet+Jenkins

Depending on what you're deploying and how you want to deploy it some plugins that may be helpful to your process are:

• https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Publish+Over+SSH+Plugin
• https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Deploy+Plugin
• https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Publish+Over+FTP+Plugin

Answer 2

Instead of keeping this files in the classpath, you can keep these files at src/main/resources/META-INF. So when you build your project using maven and if you have chosen the packaging as ear <artifactId>ProjectName</artifactId> <version>Version</version> <packaging>ear</packaging>
then all these files will be packaged inside the jar and will be available in your maven repository

Answer 3

Maven is a build tool and not a deployment tool. For deployment to environments like Test, Q&A or Prod other tools are more suitable like Chef, Puppet or may be a simply shell script etc