Maven: A Developer's Notebook

Installing a Plug-in from Its Sources

Now that you know how to write a plug-in, let's install your newly created Jarexec plug-in in your local Maven installation.

How do I do that?

A plug-in is packaged as a JAR, so the first step is to configure the Jarexec project's build so that it generates a valid plug-in JAR. A valid plug-in JAR must contain some requisite files: plugin.jelly, plugin.properties, and (optionally) plug-in resources. Plug-in resources, as you will see in a following lab, are simply any file that is put in a plugin-resources/ directory in the JAR.

You create a plug-in JAR by calling the plugin:plugin goal of the Plugin plug-in. In practice, this goal simply calls the jar:jar goal internally. To generate a valid JAR configure your jarexec/project.xml file and define a resources section to include plugin.jelly, plugin.properties, and any plug-in resources in your plug-in's JAR file:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
  
<project>
  <pomVersion>3</pomVersion>
  <artifactId>jarexec</artifactId>
  <name>JAR Executor</name>
  <groupId>mdn</groupId>
  [...]
  <build>
    <sourceDirectory>src/main</sourceDirectory>
    <unitTestSourceDirectory>src/test</unitTestSourceDirectory>
  
    <unitTest>
      <includes>
        <include>**/*Test.java</include>
      </includes>
    </unitTest>
  
    <resources>
               <resource>
               <directory>src/plugin-resources</directory>
               <targetPath>plugin-resources</targetPath>
               </resource>
               <resource>
               <directory>.</directory>
               <includes>
               <include>plugin.jelly</include>
               <include>plugin.properties</include>
               <include>project.xml</include> ...