Maven by Example
Maven by Example

6.13. Building a Packaged Command Line Application

In the Section 6.8, “Running the Simple Weather Program” section earlier in descriptor in the Maven Assembly plugin to produce a distributable JAR file, which contains the project’s bytecode and all of the dependencies.

The Maven Assembly plugin is a plugin you can use to create arbitrary distributions for your applications. You can use the Maven Assembly plugin to assemble the output of your project in any format you desire by defining a custom assembly descriptor. In a later chapter we will show you how to create a custom assembly descriptor which produces a more complex archive for the Simple Weather application. In this chapter, we’re going to use the predefined jar-with-dependencies format. To configure the Maven Assembly Plugin, we need to add the following plugin configuration to our existing build configuration in the pom.xml.

Configuring the Maven Assembly Descriptor.  

<project>
    [...]
    <build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <artifactId>maven-assembly-plugin</artifactId>
                <configuration>
                    <descriptorRefs>
                        <descriptorRef>jar-with-dependencies</descriptorRef>
                    </descriptorRefs>
                </configuration>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>
    [...]
</project>

Once you’ve added this configuration, you can build the assembly by running the assembly:assembly goal. In the following screen listing, the assembly:assembly goal is executed after the Maven build reaches the install lifecycle phase:

$ mvn install assembly:assembly
...
[INFO] [jar:jar]
[INFO] Building jar:
~/examples/ch-custom/simple-weather/target/simple-weather-1.0.jar
[INFO] [assembly:assembly]
[INFO] Processing DependencySet (output=)
[INFO] Expanding: \
.m2/repository/dom4j/dom4j/1.6.1/dom4j-1.6.1.jar into \
/tmp/archived-file-set.1437961776.tmp
[INFO] Expanding: .m2/repository/commons-lang/commons-lang/2.1/\
commons-lang-2.1.jar
into /tmp/archived-file-set.305257225.tmp
... (Maven Expands all dependencies into a temporary directory) ...
[INFO] Building jar: \
~/examples/ch-custom/simple-weather/target/\
simple-weather-1.0-jar-with-dependencies.jar

Once our assembly is assembled in target/'simple-weather-1.0-jar-with-'dependencies.jar, we can run the Main class again from the command line. To run the simple weather application’s Main class, execute the following commands from your project’s base directory:

$ cd target
$ java -cp simple-weather-1.0-jar-with-dependencies.jar \
       org.sonatype.mavenbook.weather.Main 10002
0INFO  YahooRetriever  - Retrieving Weather Data
221  INFO  YahooParser  - Creating XML Reader
399  INFO  YahooParser  - Parsing XML Response
474  INFO  WeatherFormatter  - Formatting Weather Data
*********************************
Current Weather Conditions for:
New York, NY, US

Temperature: 44
Condition: Fair
Humidity: 40
Wind Chill: 40
*********************************

The jar-with-dependencies format creates a single JAR file that includes all of the bytecode from the simple-weather project as well as the unpacked bytecode from all of the dependencies. This somewhat unconventional format produces a 9 MiB JAR file containing approximately 5,290 classes, but it does provide for an easy distribution format for applications you’ve developed with Maven. Later in this book, we’ll show you how to create a custom assembly descriptor to produce a more standard distribution.

6.13.1. Attaching the Assembly Goal to the Package Phase

In Maven 1, a build was customized by stringing together a series of plugin goals. Each plugin goal had prerequisites and defined a relationship to other plugin goals. With the release of Maven 2, a lifecycle was introduced and plugin goals are now associated with a series of phases in a default Maven build lifecycle. The lifecycle provides a solid foundation that makes it easier to predict and manage the plugin goals which will be executed in a given build. In Maven 1, plugin goals related to one another directly; in Maven 2, plugin goals relate to a set of common lifecycle stages. While it is certainly valid to execute a plugin goal directly from the command-line as we just demonstrated, it is more consistent with the design of Maven to configure the Assembly plugin to execute the assembly:assembly goal during a phase in the Maven lifecycle.

The following plugin configuration configures the Maven Assembly plugin to execute the attached goal during the package phase of the Maven default build lifecycle. The attached goal does the same thing as the assembly goal. To bind to assembly:attached goal to the package phase we use the executions element under plugin in the build section of the project’s POM.

Configuring Attached Goal Execution During the Package Lifecycle Phase.  

<project>
    [...]
    <build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <artifactId>maven-assembly-plugin</artifactId>
                <configuration>
                    <descriptorRefs>
                        <descriptorRef>jar-with-dependencies</descriptorRef>
                    </descriptorRefs>
                </configuration>
                <executions>
                    <execution>
                        <id>simple-command</id>
                        <phase>package</phase>
                        <goals>
                            <goal>attached</goal>
                        </goals>
                    </execution>
                </executions>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>
    [...]
</project>

Once you have this configuration in your POM, all you need to do to generate the assembly is run mvn package. The execution configuration will make sure that the assembly:attached goal is executed when the Maven lifecycle transitions to the package phase of the lifecycle. The assembly will also be created if you run mvn install as the package phase precedes the install phase in the default Maven lifecycle.

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