Maven: Where to put generated resources for tomcat-maven-plugin?

Question

I have CSS and JavaScript files in src/main/webapp directory of my project. I want to join add joined and minified version of these resources to my WAR file and to

Answer 1

Use warSourceDirectory:

${project.build.directory}/${project.build.finalName}

Instead of this configuration property (warDirectory) for the tomcat-maven-plugin:

${project.build.directory}/${project.build.finalName}

According to the tomcat-maven-plugin documentation, warSourceDirectory is where the web resources get picked up, and its default value is ${basedir}/src/main/webapp. This means that if you don’t set that property, you need to generate your unified/minified JavaScript file under ${basedir}/src/main/webapp.

If you set warSourceDirectory to the output folder, this means you need to generate this file before starting Tomcat.