How can I merge resource files in a Maven assembly?

Question

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

Answer 1

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)

Answer 2

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 are metaInf-services, file-aggregator, plexus, metaInf-spring. It's a bit buried in the code (found in the package org.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 in com.mycompany.actions.

descriptor.xml

<assembly>

...

<containerDescriptorHandlers>

    <containerDescriptorHandler>
        <handlerName>metaInf-services</handlerName>
    </containerDescriptorHandler>

    <containerDescriptorHandler>
        <handlerName>file-aggregator</handlerName>
        <configuration>
            <filePattern>com/mycompany/actions/action.properties</filePattern>
            <outputPath>com/mycompany/actions/action.properties</outputPath>
        </configuration>
    </containerDescriptorHandler>

</containerDescriptorHandlers>

....

</assembly>

The file-aggregator can contain a regular expression in the filePattern to match multiple files. The following would match all files names 'action.properties'.

<filePattern>.+/action.properties</filePattern>

The metaInf-services and metaInf-spring are used for aggregating SPI and spring config files respectively whilst the plexus handler will aggregate META-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 in META-INF/plexus/components.xml. You can do this by creating an upstream project which has a dependency on maven-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 in org.apache.maven.plugin.assembly.filter.* package of the assembly source code.

CustomHandler.java

package com.mycompany;

import org.apache.maven.plugin.assembly.filter.ContainerDescriptorHandler;

public class CustomHandler implements ContainerDescriptorHandler {
    // body not shown
}

then define the component in /src/main/resources/META-INF/plexus/components.xml

components.xml

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<component-set>
    <components>
        <component>
            <role>org.apache.maven.plugin.assembly.filter.ContainerDescriptorHandler</role>
            <role-hint>custom-handler</role-hint>
            <implementation>com.mycompany.CustomHandler</implementation>
            <instantiation-strategy>per-lookup</instantiation-strategy>
        </component>
    </components>
</component-set>

Finally you add this as a dependency on the assembly plugin in the project you wish to assemble

pom.xml

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-assembly-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.2.1</version>
    <configuration>
        <descriptors>
            <descriptor>...</descriptor>
        </descriptors>
    </configuration>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.mycompany</groupId>
            <artifactId>sample-handler</artifactId>
            <version>1.0</version>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
</plugin>

and define the handlerName in the descriptor

descriptor.xml

...
<containerDescriptorHandler>
    <handlerName>custom-handler</handlerName>
</containerDescriptorHandler>
...

The maven-shade-plugin can also create 'uber-jars' and has some resource transforms for handling XML, licences and manifests.

J

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

https://github.com/rob19780114/merge-maven-plugin (available on maven central) also seems to do the job. See below for an example configuration

 <plugin>
    <groupId>org.zcore.maven</groupId>
    <artifactId>merge-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>0.0.3</version>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>merge</id>
            <phase>generate-resources</phase>
            <goals>
                <goal>merge</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
              <mergers>
                <merger>
                  <target>${build.outputDirectory}/output-file-1</target>
                  <sources>
                    <source>src/main/resources/file1</source>
                    <source>src/main/resources/file2</source>
                  </sources>
                </merger>
                <merger>
                  <target>${build.outputDirectory}/output-file-2</target>
                  <sources>
                    <source>src/main/resources/file3</source>
                    <source>src/main/resources/file4</source>
                  </sources>
                </merger>
              </mergers>
            </configuration>
        </execution>
    </executions>