I had the following requirements:
- create an installer for my application;
- the application is based on web-technologies, so the installer must ship an application server and automatically install my webapp into it;
- the application requires a dbms (Postgres was the choice, a similar process will work also with Hsqldb), so the installer must ship it, possibly automatically installing it on the target machine;
- my application is build through maven, so the creation of the installer should be integrated in the whole build chain;
- the installer must be easy to use, even for monkey-brained users
I looked for a standardized way to do all this: although Maven team has planned some native support for this kind of problems
see this,at the moment there are only partial solutions from non-mainstreamexternal plugins. I‘ll go through the entire process, and at the end,some more alternatives are proposed.
The solution I ended up involves the following steps:
- install Postgres installer into a maven repository: this is an easy step, because it only requires to zip the target file (i did it manually, but if you really you can let maven do it for you...which I don‘t suggest at all), and install and deploy it into your local repository. So I downloaded the file from the msi postgres windows and issued this:
mvn -Dfile=postgres-installer.zip \n
-DgeneratePom=true \n
-DgroupId=postgres \n
-DartifactId=postgres-installer \n
-Dversion=VERSION-NUMBER -DrepositoryId=SERVER \n
-Durl=scp://path/to/your/maven2/repository \n
-Dpackaging=zip \n
deploy:deploy-file
- install an application server into a maven repository: do the same for your application server of choice: mine was jetty, because I use it heavily during development, and because its installint procedure is a matter of unzipping and copying its files somewhere (which other application servers allow this ?):
mvn -Dfile=jetty-6.0.2.zip \n
-DgeneratePom=true \n
-DgroupId=jetty \n
-DartifactId=jetty \n
-Dversion=VERSION-NUMBER -DrepositoryId=SERVER \n
-Durl=scp://path/to/your/maven2/repository \n
-Dpackaging=zip \n
deploy:deploy-file
- install the application war into a maven repository: this is maybe the easiest step: given your webapp, which should have a packaging element of value war, it is only a matter of doing a mvn deploy from the root of your project, given that you‘ve provided the correct distribution management informations in the pom; i won‘t comment further on this;
- install locally the izpack-maven-plugin: this mojo is still a proposal, so you can‘t simply declare it in your pom: you need to install by your self. Let‘s get it from Jira and from the root directory:
mvn install
- use the maven-dependency-plugin properly:this is the interesting part. It requires just a little bit of knowledge of the goals available through this plugin and to combine them propertly. here is the result:
<plugins>
<plugin>
<groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
<artifactId>dependency-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<executions>
<!-- unzip jetty & postgresql -->
<execution>
<id>unzip-jetty-postgresql</id>
<phase>process-resources</phase>
<goals>
<goal>unpack</goal>
</goals>
<configuration>
<artifactItems>
<artifactItem>
<groupId>jetty</groupId>
<artifactId>jetty-standalone</artifactId>
<version>6.0.2</version>
<type>zip</type>
<outputDirectory>
${project.build.directory}/${project.build.finalName}/
</outputDirectory>
</artifactItem>
<artifactItem>
<groupId>postgresql</groupId>
<artifactId>postgresql-installer-win</artifactId>
<version>8.1.5</version>
<type>zip</type>
<outputDirectory>
${project.build.directory}/${project.build.finalName}/postgresql/
</outputDirectory>
</artifactItem>
</artifactItems>
</configuration>
</execution>
<execution>
<id>copy-webapp-war</id>
<phase>process-resources</phase>
<goals>
<goal>copy</goal>
</goals>
<configuration>
<stripVersion>true</stripVersion>
<artifactItems>
<artifactItem>
<groupId>your-groupid</groupId>
<artifactId>your-webapp</artifactId>
<version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
<type>war</type>
<outputDirectory>
${project.build.directory}/${project.build.finalName}/jetty-6.0.2/webapps/
</outputDirectory>
</artifactItem>
</artifactItems>
</configuration>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>
</plugins>
- configure the izpack plugin to run in the package phase: this is very easy, and goes like this:
<plugin>
<groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
<artifactId>izpack-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
<executions>
<execution>
<phase>package</phase>
<goals>
<goal>izpack</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>
Having this pom configuration, it is enough to issue
mvn package to find in our
target/directory a beautiful executable jar file, which will install ourapplication, togheter with postgres and application in the targetmachine.
Ah, sure: you need a working izpack.xml file in src/izpack/directory to let the maven plugin works correctly. In a future blogentry, I‘ll go on with this example showing how to write such file.
One more thing: very recently, Vincent Massol proposed a new support(the Packager API) within the core api of cargo plugin, which shouldgreetly simplify this process. Stay tuned!
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