How to include resources from war to another maven project

Question

I have a maven project , which needs to copy webapp/WEB-INF/ resources from another maven project which is packaged as a war . How do I do it ? PLease suggest

Can you elaborate a bit? What sort of resources? Why can they not be included in the second project directly? — Bittrance, May 31 '12 at 07:34
The resources are - ftl files and xml files . These resources are common to many projects , so i would like to keep them separately instead of adding individually in all projects . — user1197135, May 31 '12 at 07:40

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered May 31 '12 at 09:05

I can see some alternatives:

Use external references in your version control system to point all repos to the same files.
The Maven Dependency module can copy and unpack project dependencies. From there, you can use the Maven Assembly plugin (or Ant targets) to include parts of that dependency in your own installation.
At least for the FTL files, perhaps you could package them in a separate Jar file and then load them as resources through the class loader.

If the resources are filtered, you may get into problem with solution 1 if you want the filtered version and 2, 3 if you want the source version.

Hope this helps.

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:28

As Bittrance said, you should use the maven dependency plugin.

The better way is to create project that include all your shared resources, probably a type zip, which is build up with the assembly plugin. This is the good "maven way". It's a better solution than unpacking a war.

Then, refer it

    <dependency>
        <groupId>com.mygroup/groupId>
        <artifactId>my-dependencies</artifactId>
        <version>1.0.0</version>
        <type>zip</type>
    </dependency>

Next, you use the maven dependency plugin to unpack your resources, in the directory of your choice (probably WEB-INF/ ?)

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-dependency-plugin</artifactId>
    <executions>
       <execution>
           <id>unpack-cfg-test-resources</id>
           <goals>
                <goal>unpack-dependencies</goal>
           </goals>
           <phase>resources</phase>
              <configuration>
                <outputDirectory>${project.build.directory}/WEB-INF/</outputDirectory>
                                <includeArtifacIds>my-resources</includeArtifacIds>
                <excludeTypes>pom</excludeTypes>
                <excludeTransitive>true</excludeTransitive>
            </configuration>
        </execution>
     </executions>
 </plugin>

I'm not realy sure of this code snippet (written for another purpose), but this is an example. For more information, please follow this link : http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-dependency-plugin/

If you can't shared a common-project including your files, you can unpack war including only ftl (or whatever you want), but it's not a realy clean solution ;)

There is a lot of posts that deal with this subject : Unzip dependency in maven ... Just try with the keywords maven-dependency-plugin, unpack :)

Hope that will help you.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 19 '17 at 08:11

(This assumes your dependent project is java (jar) and not another web app, if it is a webapp I think the solution is similar).

I suggest a (slightly) different approach:
Instead of reading resources from war, add this to your war pom, to generate a jar in the artifact as well as a war:

<!-- maven war plugin config -->
<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <configuration>
        ...
        <attachClasses>true</attachClasses>
        <classesClassifier>some-string</classesClassifier>
    </configuration>
    <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>3.0.0</version>
</plugin>
...
<resources>
<!-- This is for inclusion in the jar, so dependent module can load it -->
    <resource>
        <targetPath>some-path</targetPath>
        <directory>src/main/webapp/path...</directory>
        <includes>
            <include>your-resource</include>
        </includes>
    </resource>
</resources>

And this to your consuming pom, so the generated jar will be loaded:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.company</groupId>
    <artifactId>...</artifactId>
    <classifier>some-string</classifier>
</dependency>

Then you will be able to load the resources the usual way (getResourceAsStream("some-path/your-resource"))

How to include resources from war to another maven project

3 Answers3