Maven thrift plugin - How can I include thrift definitions?

Question

I'm currently using the maven-thrift-plugin to generate jars and jsnode automatically during build. I'm successfully able to compile and deploy the definitions and use them in another project. But now I need to have that other project define its own thrift type that includes the other definitions, and I can't see how to accomplish this in a nice automated way. Example:

I have a project Foo. It's in it's own git repo FooGitRepo and produces maven artifact FooMvnArtifact in com.example.foo as well. In Foo I have something like "src/thrift/foo.thrift" which defines FooType in the com.example.foo package. So far so good.

The pom for the plugin looks like this:

       <plugin>
            <groupId>org.apache.thrift.tools</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-thrift-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>0.1.11</version>
            <configuration>
                <thriftExecutable>${project.basedir}/compiler/thrift-0.9.1</thriftExecutable>
                <thriftSourceRoot>${basedir}/src</thriftSourceRoot>
            </configuration>
            <executions>
                <execution>
                    <id>generate-thrift-java</id>
                    <phase>generate-sources</phase>
                    <configuration>
                        <generator>java</generator>
                        <outputDirectory>
                            gen-java
                        </outputDirectory>
                        <compileOutput>true</compileOutput>
                    </configuration>
                    <goals>
                        <goal>compile</goal>
                    </goals>
                </execution>
                <execution>
                    <id>generate-thrift-jsnode</id>
                    <phase>generate-sources</phase>
                    <configuration>
                        <generator>js:node</generator>
                        <outputDirectory>
                            gen-jsnode
                        </outputDirectory>
                        <compileOutput>false</compileOutput>
                    </configuration>
                    <goals>
                        <goal>compile</goal>
                    </goals>
                </execution>
                <execution>
                    <id>thrift-test-sources</id>
                    <phase>generate-test-sources</phase>
                    <goals>
                        <goal>testCompile</goal>
                    </goals>
                </execution>
            </executions>
        </plugin>

This produces the outputs in artifacts appropriate for the specified languages.

In my second project, Bar which is in its own git repo has its own maven repo I use Foo in java. This is very simple. I just put FooMvnArtifact in the dependency section of Bar's pom. Then in the java code all I have to do is import com.example.foo.FooType. But now I want to add a Bar.thrift with a BarType that contains a FooType as a member. That means that Bar.thrift needs to include Foo.thrift. But that isn't visible from Bar because the maven repo only contains the language-specific artifacts of the thrift compilation, not the definition itself.

How can I cause the Foo maven repo to contain the thrift definition itself? How can I get Bar to depend on this definition in such a way that I can include it in another thrift definition? Preferably I can do this in such a way as to avoid naming collisions if in the future I have multiple CommonType.thrift I need to import from different projects.

In the future this is likely going to come up in the context of protocol buffers as well. I would expect the solutions would be similar.

Answer 1

When the maven-thrift-plugin executes the generate-sources process,
1. it copies all dependent thrift files to a temporary directory
2. the dependent thrift files are found from the project's compile-dependency artifacts (which may be a jar, zip or other type artifact file)

You just need to add the project which contains the dependency thrift file into current project's compile dependency.