Alex Rivera | Logout

Best practices for copying files with Maven

Asked 2009-02-25T14:38:00.700
217

I have config files and various documents that I want to copy from the dev environment to the dev-server directory using Maven2. Strangely, Maven does not seem strong at this task.

Some of the options:

  • Simple use a copy task in Maven
<copy file="src/main/resources/config.properties" tofile="${project.server.config}/config.properties"/>

  • Use the Ant plugin to execute copy from Ant.

    • Construct an artifact of type zip, alongside the "main" artifact of the POM which is usually of type jar, then unpack that artifact from the repository into the target directory.

    • maven-resources plugin, as mentioned below.

    • Maven Assembly plugin -- but this seems to require a lot of manual definitions, when I want to do things simply and "conventionally."

    • This page even shows how to build a plugin to do copying!

    • maven-upload plugin, as mentioned below.

    • maven-dependency-plugin with copy, as mentioned below.


All these seem needlessly ad hoc: Maven is supposed to excel at doing these standard tasks without fuss and bother.

Any advice?

maven maven-2 build-process release-management
Edit
Report

1 Answer

21

The maven dependency plugin saved me a lot of time fondling with ant tasks:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-dependency-plugin</artifactId>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>install-jar</id>
            <phase>install</phase>
            <goals>
                <goal>copy</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
                <artifactItems>
                    <artifactItem>
                        <groupId>...</groupId>
                        <artifactId>...</artifactId>
                        <version>...</version>
                    </artifactItem>
                </artifactItems>
                <outputDirectory>...</outputDirectory>
                <stripVersion>true</stripVersion>
            </configuration>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

The dependency:copy is documentend, and has more useful goals like unpack.

answered 2011-11-18T10:59:06.950

Your Answer