CODEWITHSUNDEEP
springmavenspring-mvcspring-bootspring-boot-maven-plugin
Krishna
Krishna

Reputation: 7294

Spring Boot Migration Issue on Packaging JAR and WAR using Maven

We are trying to migrate our existing Spring MVC applications to Spring Boot application. Our existing applications are using 3.2.9, so tons of XML configurations. All the beans are defined in the XML files. What we have done is first we have upgraded our existing applications to Spring 4.2.5 version since Spring Boot will work only with Spring 4 versions.

Our requirement is to have both FAT JARs and WAR files from the build. Most of our existing customers would prefer Application Server deployment, so we have to create WAR file for them. Also for our internal testing and new deployments, we are planning to use FAT JARs.

How can we achieve them in the Maven file, we are able to provide separately as below. Is there any maven plug-in to generate both in single build?

<packaging>jar</packaging>

or

<packaging>war</packaging>

We are publishing our artifacts into Nexus repository. So, we want to have the separate repository location for JAR files and WAR files. Can we do that using the single pom.xml file?

Also another question, we have all the XML configurations under WEB-INF folder. When we are moving to the Spring Boot application, it has to be under the resources folder. How can we handle them easily. When we build FAT jars, the resources are not looked under WEB-INF because it simply ignores the webapp project.

I am looking forward for some guidance to complete the migration. Infact, we have already done that changes and it is working fine, but we are confused on this WAR / JAR generations.

Update: I have got another question in mind, if we are converting our existing applications to spring boot, do we still have to maintain WEB-INF folder in the web-app or can move everything to the resources folder?. While building the WAR file, whether spring boot takes care of moving the resources to WEB-INF? How spring boot would manage to create the WAR file if you are putting all the resources under the resources folder.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1254

Answers (2)

luboskrnac
luboskrnac

Reputation: 24561

Building WAR and FAT JAR is very easy with Gradle.

With Maven, I would try multi module setup, where one sub-module will build fat JAR and second will build WAR file.

Application logic can be as third sub-module and thus being standalone JAR with Spring configuration and beans. This application logic JAR would be as dependency for fat JAR and WAR module. WAR specific configuration can be placed in Maven WAR sub-module.

I didn't have such requirement before, so don't know what challenges may occur. For sure I wouldn't try to integrate maven-assembly-plugin or other packaging plugins with spring-boot-maven-plugin.

Concerning location of config files, just place them into src/main/resources or it's sub-folders according Spring Boot conventions. Spring Boot is opinionated framework and will be most friendly to you if you don't try to resist defaults.

Upvotes: 3

Software Engineer
Software Engineer

Reputation: 16130

Maven does not handle this gracefully, but its far from difficult to solve. You can do this with 3 pom files. One parent pom that contains the majority of the configuration, and one each for the packaging portion of the work. This would neatly separate the concerns of the two different assembly patterns too.

To clarify -- I'm not recommending a multi-module configuration here, just multiple poms with names like war-pom.xml and fat-jar-pom.xml, along with parent-pom.xml.

Upvotes: 2

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