maven - give me my files!

Every time I work with Maven I like a ton of things about it and get really annoyed by a few.  Today I was faced with an issue for the second time: I have a Maven project that produces a .jar as its artifact and I want to have a build goal produce a directory with that .jar AND copies of the .jar’s that it depends on.  Without this, my only means of distributing my code is if the recipient uses Maven also.  I partially solved this a few months ago and today found a more complete solution.  Its not complete (the .jars end up in a horribly ugly directory under the target folder) but it works … and that’s what matters.

The solutions uses the Maven Assembly plugin.  First, I needed a custom assembly configuration which I put in a file called assembly.xml in the root of my project:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<assembly>
    <id>bin</id>
    <formats>
        <format>dir</format>
    </formats>
    <dependencySets>
        <dependencySet>
            <unpack>false</unpack>
        </dependencySet>
    </dependencySets>
</assembly>

This file describes how the plugin should assembly my project; moving all of my dependencies, unpacked, into a single folder.  There is a huge assortment of options available ranging from include/exclude parameters to how/where to move files.  I am still slowly working my way through the reference doc.

Second, I modified my pom.xml to configure the Assembly plugin:

<plugin>
  <artifactId>maven-assembly-plugin</artifactId>
  <configuration>
    <descriptors>
      <descriptor>assembly.xml</descriptor>
    </descriptors>
   </configuration>
</plugin>

Finally, a call to mvn assembly:directory will compile your project, run the tests, package your project and produce the desired folder. Done.

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