How to create empty folders with maven archetype?

Question

There is an existing issue for this approach, located on Codehaus JIRA #ARCHETYPE-57, but all instructions listed in this ticket failed for me. Also the blog post of marekdec Ho

Answer 1

I did a quick test and... it worked for me. First, I created an archetype:

$ mvn archetype:generate -B -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-archetype \
                            -DgroupId=com.stackoverflow \
                            -DartifactId=Q2786966 \
                            -Dversion=1.0-SNAPSHOT \

I renamed the archetype.xml into archetype-metadata.xml (the former is for Archetype 1.0.X, the later is for Archetype 2.0.X) so the project looks like:

$ tree .
.
├── pom.xml
└── src
    └── main
        └── resources
            ├── archetype-resources
            │   ├── pom.xml
            │   └── src
            │       ├── main
            │       │   └── java
            │       │       └── App.java
            │       └── test
            │           └── java
            │               └── AppTest.java
            └── META-INF
                └── maven
                    └── archetype-metadata.xml

And archetype-metadata.xml contains:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<archetype-descriptor name="Q2786966">
  <fileSets>
    <fileSet filtered="true" encoding="UTF-8">
      <directory>src/main/webapp</directory>
    </fileSet>
    <fileSet filtered="true" packaged="true">
      <directory>src/main/java</directory>
      <includes>
        <include>**/*.java</include>
      </includes>
    </fileSet>
  </fileSets>
</archetype-descriptor>

Then I installed the archetype and used it to create a project:

$ mvn install
$ cd ~/tmp
$ mvn archetype:generate -B -DarchetypeGroupId=com.stackoverflow \
                            -DarchetypeArtifactId=Q2786966 \
                            -DarchetypeVersion=1.0-SNAPSHOT \
                            -DgroupId=my.group \
                            -DartifactId=my-artifact \
                            -Dversion=1.0-SNAPSHOT

And the resulting project looks like this:

$ tree my-artifact/
my-artifact/
├── pom.xml
└── src
    └── main
        ├── java
        │   └── my-group
        │       └── App.java
        └── webapp

The empty webapp directory is there.

Answer 2

I met the same problem with the first answer to this question. Reconfiguring the maven-resources-plugin.

According to this ticket MRESOURCES-36, there should be a <includeEmptyDirs> element, but only for Maven Resources Plugin 2.3.

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
  <artifactId>maven-resources-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>2.3</version>
  <configuration>
    <includeEmptyDirs>true</includeEmptyDirs>
  </configuration>
</plugin>

Answer 3

I solved this issue by adding the following configuration to the archetypes pom.xml build configuration.

Assuming your archetype-metadata.xml configuration file's filesets is as follows:

<fileSet encoding="UTF-8">
 <directory>src</directory>
  <includes>
   <include>**/**</include>
  </includes>
</fileSet>

Add this to your pom.xml, not the one included with the archetype, the actual project pom.xml

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
  <artifactId>maven-resources-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>2.3</version>
  <configuration>
    <includeEmptyDirs>true</includeEmptyDirs>
  </configuration>
</plugin>

The xml configuration line which does the magic is

<includeEmptyDirs>true</includeEmptyDirs>

The full configuration will look as follows

<project ...>
...

    <build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
                <artifactId>maven-resources-plugin</artifactId>
                <version>2.3</version>
                <configuration>
                    <includeEmptyDirs>true</includeEmptyDirs>
                </configuration>
            </plugin>

        </plugins>
    </build>

</project>