Maven: Let SkinnyWars preserve some libraries

Question

I am using maven to build an ear file with two EJBs and a few web applications. I'd like to use skinny wars, because more wars are likely to follow.

As I understood, the following will remove all *.jar files (except ejb jars) from the WEB-INF/lib directory of all war files:

<dependencies>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>my.domain</groupId>
    <artifactId>project</artifactId>
    <version>${project.version}</version>
    <type>war</type>
  </dependency>

  <!-- Scope: Provided for skinnies. -->
  <dependency>
    <groupId>my.domain</groupId>
    <artifactId>project</artifactId>
    <version>${project.version}</version>
    <type>pom</type>
  </dependency>
</dependencies>

[..]

 <configuration>
      <version>7</version>
      <defaultLitBundleDir>lib/</defaultLitBundleDir>
      <skinnyWars>true</skinnyWars>
[..]

The problem I have is that will obviously also remove all webjars. Webjars are web libraries (css, JS, etc.) which are packaged inside jar files like this:

With any Servlet 3 compatible container, the WebJars that are in the WEB-INF/lib directory are automatically made available as static resources. This works because anything in a META-INF/resources directory in a JAR in WEB-INF/lib is automatically exposed as a static resource.

Source: http://www.webjars.org/documentation#servlet3

I really like this idea. So now, when all jars are moved to myear!/lib/webjar, the containing files are not exposed anymore. :-(

I haven't found an option for skinnyWars to NOT exclude certain libraries (like org.webjars::).

If there is another solution, I'd love to see your input.

No, it won't remove all JARs from the WAR. Only those that were specified as dependency in the EAR's POM. See http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-ear-plugin/examples/skinny-wars.html — Tunaki, Feb 07 '17 at 18:37
Ahh okay. I just included the war again with dependency:type=pom, because of the DRY principle. Anyway, I found another solution, posting it in a moment. — Benjamin Marwell, Feb 08 '17 at 08:30

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 08 '17 at 08:37

So, there was an easy solution. As you see from my updated answer, I had the (almost) same dependency of the war file twice: Once as type=war, another one as type=pom, so all dependencies were included in the ear and stripped from the war.

Now, I could just manually put the shared libraries there, but I was thinking of DRY. So I wanted to go with the mentioned solution. Seems a bit hacky, but works flawlessly.

But some moments later, I clicked on the wrong link in the webjars documentation for Servlet2, which I am not using.

It works by having another dependency, which consists of only one Servlet. This servlet rewrites/passes requests to the corresponding files in META-INF/resources. I thought this may be working for my situation as well.

So I included the dependency seen on the servlet2 documentation and added the corresponding parts to the web.xml file. And not it's working as expected.

Maven: Let SkinnyWars preserve some libraries

1 Answers1