Executable War in Maven

One of the many issues I had (have) with Maven is finding out how to use an appropriate plugin. The site documentation is normally pretty obscure, and examples are sparse. One of the activites we needed to do recently is to turn our war artifact into something that would run standalone. I’d normally use something like jetty for this but I didn’t find a way to easy bundle jetty and refer to the war within the same classpath (and still have things work).

Another tool I stumbled across was winstone (Hudson uses this beast). Wrapping this up seemed pretty easy enough. Note that the configuration below is used to start a war that won’t have dynamic JSP compilation. If you do, you can add a useJasper=true configuration and add the appropriate maven dependencies for jasper to ensure they’re available.

The result of this plugin will effectively build an executable jar, that you simply start up.

Need to add these dependencies:

Given that your project is a war package as well

<plugin>
	<groupId>net.sf.alchim</groupId>
	<artifactId>winstone-maven-plugin</artifactId>
	<executions>
		<execution>
			<goals>
				<goal>embed</goal>
			</goals>
			<phase>package</phase>
		</execution>
	</executions>
	<configuration>
		<filename>executableWebApplication.jar</filename>
	</configuration>
</plugin>

You will find this artifact built in your standard target directly.