I'm using Maven and its assembly plugin to build a distribution package of my project like this:
- one project assembles a basic runtime (based on Felix), with the appropriate directories and bundles, in a ZIP file.
- third-party libraries are collected in one project each and either converted to OSGi bundles or, if they are already OSGi compatible, they are just copied
- my own project consists of several modules that are built into OSGi bundles, too.
Now, I'm adding another project that unpacks the ZIP, drops all the other JARs into the proper directories, and repackages it for distribution. Now, my bundles might contain configuration files that I want to merge into, rather than replacing, identically named ones in the runtime assembly. How do I do that?
The files are plain text (property files), but I might run into a similar situation with XML files later.
Ive also created a merge files plugin, in my case i use it to merge SQL files from various projects into a single installer SQL file which can create all the schemas/tables/static data etc for our apps in a single file, http://croche.googlecode.com/svn/docs/maven-merge-files-plugin/0.1/usage.html
I don't know of a robust solution to this problem. But a bit of looking around shows that somebody has created a plugin to merge properties files. By the look of it you need to tell it which files to merge, which is a good thing as you don't want this applied willy nilly.
Assuming you have used dependency-unpack to unpack the zip to a known location, it would be a case of configuring the plugin to merge each pair of properties files and specify the appropriate target location.
You could extend the plugin to handle XML by using something like xmlmerge from EL4J, as described in this Javaworld article.
https://github.com/rob19780114/merge-maven-plugin (available on maven central) also seems to do the job. See below for an example configuration
Old question but stumbled over it while trying to solve similar problem: Assembly plugin 2.2 has capabilities to merge files: http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-assembly-plugin/assembly.html#class_containerDescriptorHandler e.g. handlerName "metaInf-services" (will concat all META-INF/services files), "metaInf-spring" are the only ones I know of (I personally needed metaInf-services)
Expanding a bit on Juergen's answer for those who stumble on this - the
containerDescriptorHandler
in the descriptor can take four values (v2.3), these aremetaInf-services
,file-aggregator
,plexus
,metaInf-spring
. It's a bit buried in the code (found in the packageorg.apache.maven.plugin.assembly.filter
) but it is possible to aggregate config/properties files.Here's an example descriptor that aggregates the
META-INF/services
and named property files located incom.mycompany.actions
.descriptor.xml
The
file-aggregator
can contain a regular expression in thefilePattern
to match multiple files. The following would match all files names 'action.properties'.The
metaInf-services
andmetaInf-spring
are used for aggregating SPI and spring config files respectively whilst theplexus
handler will aggregateMETA-INF/plexus/components.xml
together.If you need something more specialised you can add your own configuration handler by implementing
ContainerDescriptorHandler
and defining the component inMETA-INF/plexus/components.xml
. You can do this by creating an upstream project which has a dependency onmaven-assembly-plugin
and contains your custom handler. It might be possible to do this in the same project you're assembling but I didn't try that. Implementations of the handlers can be found inorg.apache.maven.plugin.assembly.filter.*
package of the assembly source code.CustomHandler.java
then define the component in
/src/main/resources/META-INF/plexus/components.xml
components.xml
Finally you add this as a dependency on the assembly plugin in the project you wish to assemble
pom.xml
and define the handlerName in the descriptor
descriptor.xml
The maven-shade-plugin can also create 'uber-jars' and has some resource transforms for handling XML, licences and manifests.
J