Chris' Tech Blog

Not much to say – how come that after years of using Maven and after endless searching for maven related stuff I find a quick reference card which pretty much contains most solutions already:

http://maven.apache.org/guides/MavenQuickReferenceCard.pdf

Cheers!

When you set up a maven project, especially for web application projects (producing a WAR file), you often need to configure the WAR file before it gets deployed. I use maven filtering together with maven profiles.

There are tons of ways to accomplish this, but I prefer to integrate deployment properties into the WAR itself. This way, the build process already produces a stand-alone WAR file ready to use, and you don’t need an additional step to modify the WAR content.

This is how you can accomplish this (pom.xml):

	<build>
		<resources>
			<resource>
				<directory>${basedir}/src/main/java</directory>
				<filtering>true</filtering>
				<includes>
					<include>**</include>
				</includes>
				<excludes>
					<exclude>**/*.java</exclude>
				</excludes>
			</resource>
			<resource>
				<directory>
					${basedir}/src/main/webapp/WEB-INF
				</directory>
				<includes>
					<include>web.xml</include>
				</includes>
				<filtering>true</filtering>
				<targetPath>..</targetPath>
			</resource>
			[...]
		<resources>
		[...]
		<filters>
			<filter>src/main/filters/filter-${env}.properties</filter>
		</filters>
	</build>
	<dependencies>
		[...]
	</dependencies>
	<properties>
		<!-- This is the default profile if no profile is selected on the command line -->
		<env>dev</env>
		[...]
	</properties>
	<profiles>
		<profile>
			<id>dev</id>
			<properties>
				<env>dev</env>
			</properties>
		</profile>
		<profile>
			<id>prod</id>
			<properties>
				<env>prod</env>
			</properties>
		</profile>
	<profiles>

Now, create one filter file for each profile (for the two profiles dev and prod in the example above):

src/main/filters/filter-dev.properties
src/main/filters/filter-prod.properties

insert filter token as described here, and execute your maven with a profile for deployment:

mvn clean install -P prod