Collapsing parent POM into the child

Question

Given a maven project with a parent POM - including mostly plugin and dependency versions - how can I generate a POM which takes the information from the parent, places it into

Answer 1

I had a similar issue a while back, you can avoid Maven substituting for the properties and resolving paths etc. by defining a new Maven plugin to do the following.

• Resolve each parent using the standard artifact factory
• Read each pom file (without resolving it) using the MavenXpp3Reader
• Merge the unresolved projects
• Write the merged project to a file

Here is some test code I used to prove the process for myself, you'd obviously need to wrap this up in a Maven plugin and bind that to some phase of your process. The resolved pom is output to the output directory (i.e. target) with the name resolved-pom.xml by default, these two properties can be overridden with the usual Maven plugin configuration approach by setting the "outputDir" and/or "pomfileName" properties.

package name.seller.rich;

import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.FileWriter;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.Writer;
import java.util.Stack;

import org.apache.maven.artifact.Artifact;
import org.apache.maven.artifact.resolver.ArtifactNotFoundException;
import org.apache.maven.artifact.resolver.ArtifactResolutionException;
import org.apache.maven.model.Model;
import org.apache.maven.model.io.xpp3.MavenXpp3Reader;
import org.apache.maven.plugin.AbstractMojo;
import org.apache.maven.plugin.MojoExecutionException;
import org.apache.maven.plugin.MojoFailureException;
import org.apache.maven.project.MavenProject;
import org.apache.maven.project.inheritance.ModelInheritanceAssembler;
import org.codehaus.plexus.util.xml.pull.XmlPullParserException;

/**
 * @goal output-project
 * @phase process-resources
 * @requiresProject true
 */
public class OutputResolvedProjectMojo extends AbstractMojo {

    /**
     * Used to look up overlay the parent models on the project's model.
     * 
     * @parameter expression=
     *            "${component.org.apache.maven.project.inheritance.ModelInheritanceAssembler}"
     * @required
     * @readonly
     */
    private ModelInheritanceAssembler modelInheritanceAssembler;

    /**
     * Used to look up Artifacts in the remote repository.
     * 
     * @parameter expression=
     *            "${component.org.apache.maven.artifact.factory.ArtifactFactory}"
     * @required
     * @readonly
     */
    protected org.apache.maven.artifact.factory.ArtifactFactory factory;

    /**
     * Used to look up Artifacts in the remote repository.
     * 
     * @parameter expression=
     *            "${component.org.apache.maven.artifact.resolver.ArtifactResolver}"
     * @required
     * @readonly
     */
    protected org.apache.maven.artifact.resolver.ArtifactResolver artifactResolver;

    /**
     * List of Remote Repositories used by the resolver
     * 
     * @parameter expression="${project.remoteArtifactRepositories}"
     * @readonly
     * @required
     */
    protected java.util.List remoteRepos;

    /**
     * Location of the local repository.
     * 
     * @parameter expression="${localRepository}"
     * @readonly
     * @required
     */
    protected org.apache.maven.artifact.repository.ArtifactRepository local;

    /**
     * @parameter expression="${project}"
     * @required
     * @readonly
     */
    private MavenProject mavenProject;

    /**
     * The directory to output the resolved project to.
     * 
     * @parameter expression="${project.build.directory}"
     */
    private File outputDir;

    /**
     * The directory to output the resolved project to.
     * 
     * @parameter expression="resolved-pom.xml"
     */
    private String pomfileName;

    public void execute() throws MojoExecutionException, MojoFailureException {
        MavenProject parentProject = mavenProject.getParent();

        // get the unresolved project by reading the file
        MavenProject bareProject = readBareProject(mavenProject.getFile());

        Stack hierarchy = new Stack();
        hierarchy.push(bareProject);

        try {
            while (parentProject != null) {

                try {
                    // get Maven to resolve the parent artifact (download if
                    // needed)
                    Artifact pomArtifact = this.factory.createArtifact(
                            parentProject.getGroupId(), parentProject
                                    .getArtifactId(), parentProject
                                    .getVersion(), "", "pom");

                    artifactResolver.resolve(pomArtifact, this.remoteRepos,
                            this.local);

                    // get the file from the local repository and read the bare
                    // project
                    File parentPomFile = pomArtifact.getFile();

                    parentProject = readBareProject(parentPomFile);

                    hierarchy.push(parentProject);

                    parentProject = parentProject.getParent();
                } catch (ArtifactResolutionException e) {
                    getLog().error("can't resolve parent pom", e);
                } catch (ArtifactNotFoundException e) {
                    getLog().error("can't resolve parent pom", e);
                }
            }

            // merge each model starting with the oldest ancestors
            MavenProject currentParent = (MavenProject) hierarchy.pop();
            MavenProject currentProject = null;
            while (hierarchy.size() != 0) {
                currentProject = (MavenProject) hierarchy.pop();
                modelInheritanceAssembler.assembleModelInheritance(
                        currentProject.getModel(), currentParent.getModel());
                currentParent = currentProject;
            }

            // spit the merged model to the output file.
            Writer writer = getWriter(outputDir, pomfileName);

            if (writer != null) {
                currentProject.writeModel(writer);
                writer.close();
            }
        } catch (IOException e) {
            getLog().error("can't write resolved pom", e);
        }

    }

    /**
     * Creates and returns a writer for outputting the project to a pom file.
     * 
     * @param logDir
     *            the directory to output the file to.
     * @param logFileName
     *            name of the log file
     * @return the writer.
     * @throws IOException
     *             if the writer cannot be created.
     */
    private Writer getWriter(final File logDir, final String logFileName)
            throws IOException {
        if (!logDir.exists()) {
            logDir.mkdirs();
        }

        File pomLog = new File(logDir, logFileName);

        if (!pomLog.exists()) {
            pomLog.createNewFile();
        }

        return new FileWriter(pomLog);
    }

    /**
     * Read the mavenProject without resolving any inherited settings.
     * 
     * @return the MavenProject for the project's POM
     * @throws MojoExecutionException
     *             if the POM can't be parsed.
     */
    MavenProject readBareProject(final File file) {
        MavenXpp3Reader reader = new MavenXpp3Reader();
        Model model = null;
        try {
            model = reader.read(new FileReader(file));
        } catch (IOException e) {
            getLog().error("can't read pom file", e);
        } catch (XmlPullParserException e) {
            getLog().error("can't read pom file", e);
        }

        return new MavenProject(model);
    }
}