How to configure custom maven project structure

Question

I know that typically maven structure is like this:

 pom.xml
 src
   - main
   - web
    - WEB-INF

However, I have a project which has the following structure

src
  - main
web
  - WEB-INF

The latter of the two above currently does not use maven. I've started using maven for this project locally by making the structure conform to the maven standard. However, I now want to automatically build this project from jenkins by getting it out of the source control (svn). So I would like to just add a pom.xml which is aware of the fact that web isn't inside src

Is this possible to do with maven?

Answer 1

You can configure the maven-war-plugin to use another warSourceDirectory but as Jeff Storey explains in his answer it is really not recommended.

This is how you would do it:

<project>
    ...
    <build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
                <version>2.3</version>
                <configuration>
                    <warSourceDirectory>web</warSourceDirectory>
                </configuration>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>
    ...
</project>

One of several problems is for example that the maven-jetty-plugin will not run out-of-the-box. It will by default look in src/main/webapp so that has to be configured.

You might not use the maven-jetty-plugin but you get the idea.

Answer 2

Using the maven war plugin properties, you can set the warSourceDirectory property http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-war-plugin/war-mojo.html (I'm not sure exactly what problems you're having, so this may or may not solve your specific problem).

However, maven is very opinionated and I would strongly recommend using the expected maven structure. Other plugins may give you unexpected problems down the road, and maven life is generally a lot easier when you follow their conventions.