Maven, exclude folder of resources from packaged j

Question

I'm trying to achieve the following distribution for my application, and I'm following this question as guideline

dist/
|-- application-1.0.jar
|-- conf/
    |-- application.properties
    |-- log4j.properties
|-- lib/
    |-- *.jar

My src/main/resources looks like following

resources/
|-- to.be.packaged.inside.jar
|-- to.be.packaged/
|   |-- also
|-- conf/
    |-- application.properties
    |-- log4j.properties

Now, I want to exclude the whole conf folder from being packaged in the JAR (but placed in the target folder).

I tried the following configuration to maven-jar-plugin

<excludes>
  <exclude>conf/*</exclude>
</excludes>

However, this still packages an empty conf folder inside the JAR. How do I exclude the folder and the content?

Answer 1

With conf/* you're only excluding the matching files, it doesn't match the conf directory. By added <exclude>conf</exclude> the directory will be excluded as well.

However, you should ask yourself: should these files be available on the classpath? I would expect the conf-directory to be a directory in the project-root (i.e. <project-root>/conf ), which also means a cleaner pom because you don't have to exclude resources.