Maven generating two different WAR files for same project

Question

I have a maven web-service project consisting of two different service classes testClass1 and testClass2 . I want to have two different WAR files for both classes of same project. Presently I am generating single WAR file for both services .

How can I generate two different WAR file for same project ? Thanks In Advance.

Answer 1

General Considerations

As per doc says, what you try to achieve is a bad pratice :

Producing Multiple Unique JARs from a Single Source Directory

As many people that complain about not being able to spread out their sources into multiple source directories seem to complain about not wanting to spread anything out, producing several unique artifacts from a single directory using includes and excludes.

Why isn't this recommended?

This practice can be confusing and risky.

You may end up building two JARs that include the same classes - this indicates that the common functionality should have been abstracted into a separate dependency. You may end up introducing a dependency between the two JARs that you didn't realise, and often a circular dependency. This indicates that the classes are in the wrong JAR, or perhaps that everything should just be a single JAR.

Solutions that fit the maven best pratices

You should consider splitting you project into two differents ones, having each one a pom, and so each one generating an artifact, here a war.

Two simples projects

You may achieve that by using either two simple projects :

service1-simple-webproject
|-- src
`-- pom.xml

service2-simple-webproject
|-- src
`-- pom.xml

This is quite simple, but you may not be able tho share easily properties / dependencies / relations between them.

Just split your own code into separates directory, and try to make it work as two independant projects.

If you think that there is some code to share between them (utilities, configuration, ...), see next section about multi module.

Multi module structure

Or you can use an appopriate multi-module hierarchy :

parent-multimodule-project
|-- service1-simple-webmodule
|   |-- src/
|   `-- pom.xml
|-- service2-simple-webmodule
|   |-- src
|   `-- pom.xml
`-- pom.xml

This will allow you to have relations between projects, share configuration at a higher level, ... Ta ke a look to this documentation :

• Maven Official doc : http://maven.apache.org/guides/mini/guide-multiple-modules.html
• Sonatype fantastic doc : http://www.sonatype.com/books/mvnex-book/reference/multimodule.html

I will probably lead you to create a third project, probably named core, or util, that would produce a jar which will contains common classes to both web project.

This is really the best way !

Functionnal solutions but strongly not advised ones

I would only give you some information, because I'm even sure it could work in this case.

Maven Assembly Plugin allow you to generate different format of package (zip, jar, war, other, ...) based on xml description files. Here documentation : http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-assembly-plugin/

Once again, I strongly advise you to NOT use this kind of workaround.