Add additional dependencies to an exisiting EAR

Question

I have 2 separate maven projects.

The first builds a lot of artifacts, and packages them up into an EAR. This is the standard product.

The second project is bespoke for a customer, and builds some additional JAR files. I need a mechanism to insert these 2 JAR files into the lib directory of the EAR built by the first project.

Is there a nice simple way of doing this, whereby I list the artifact of the first project in the second, so that it does not need to know how it was put together, it simply inserts the additional JARS.

Answer 1

You can include the contents of another ear file in your second ear file by specifying the first ear file als dependency, but using <type>pom</type> instead of ear:

if you specify an ear dependency, transitive dependencies are not resolved (ear is defined as a container type). If you use pom instead, all dependencies of your first ear are (transitive) dependencies to the second ear, and thus included.

Answer 2

You need to add those supplemental jar files as dependencies to your project pom and furthermore you need to add them to your maven-ear-plugin configuration:

<build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-ear-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>2.9</version>
        <configuration>
           [...]
           <modules>
             <jarModule>
               <groupId>artifactGroupId</groupId>
               <artifactId>artifactId</artifactId>
               <bundleDir>lib</bundleDir>
             </jarModule>
          </modules>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>