Is it possible to install the karaf server using maven?

Question

I would like to use maven to deploy a complete karaf server including my own features. But so far I am unable to find a way to add the karaf server itself as a dependency. This would save a lot of manual steps, esp. for the other developers which would not have to setup karaf manually.

This would have the added benefit that I do not have to check in the karaf server into the repository in order to have all required parts available from the repository.

Question: is there a way to configure a project using karaf which will setup the karaf server and all required dependencies without manually downloading the files from the karaf website?

Answer 1

This can be done using the karaf-maven-plugin. There is even an example which does this shipped with karaf: examples/karaf-maven-example.

Here is what the examples do

• karaf-maven-example-run uses the karaf-maven-plugin:run goal to download and start a Karaf instance.
• karaf-maven-example-run-bundle uses the karaf-maven-plugin:run goal to download, start a Karaf instance and deploy the project bundle in this running instance.
• karaf-maven-example-deploy uses the karaf-maven-plugin:deploy goal to deploy the module artifact into a Karaf instance (remote for example).
• karaf-maven-example-client uses the karaf-maven-plugin:client goal to execute a shell command on a running Karaf instance.
• karaf-maven-example-kar packages a features repository as a kar file, ready to be deployed.
• karaf-maven-example-assembly uses the karaf-maven-plugin to create a Karaf distribution.

see here for more details.