maven-war-plugin: exclude all directories but one

Question

I have a directory structure as:

src
|__ main
    |__ java
    |__ resources
    |__ webapp
        |__ css_blue
        |__ css_green
        |__ css_red
        |__ WEB-INF

where there are three seperate directories of css (as css_red, css_green, css_blue). Here, I want to include only one of them based on the -D switch as:

mvn clean install -Dcss=green

pom.xml

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
  <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
  <groupId>com.faisal.dwr</groupId>
  <artifactId>chatbox</artifactId>
  <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
  <packaging>war</packaging>
  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>javax</groupId>
      <artifactId>javaee-api</artifactId>
      <version>6.0</version>
      <scope>provided</scope>
    </dependency>
    <!-- Spring - MVC -->
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
      <artifactId>spring-webmvc</artifactId>
      <version>4.2.4.RELEASE</version>
    </dependency>
    <!-- Spring Web Security -->
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.springframework.security</groupId>
      <artifactId>spring-security-web</artifactId>
      <version>4.0.3.RELEASE</version>
    </dependency>
    <!-- Spring Security Config -->
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.springframework.security</groupId>
      <artifactId>spring-security-config</artifactId>
      <version>4.0.3.RELEASE</version>
    </dependency>
    <!-- DWR -->
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.directwebremoting</groupId>
      <artifactId>dwr</artifactId>
      <version>3.0.0-RELEASE</version>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>

    <build>
      <finalName>${project.artifactId}</finalName>
      <plugins>
       <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>2.6</version>
        <configuration>
            <packagingIncludes>css_${css}</packagingIncludes>
        </configuration>
       </plugin>
      </plugins>
    </build>
</project>

But in this case files and directories under WEB-INF not present in the final .war file.

Answer 1

By default, the packagingIncludes attribute of the maven-war-plugin will include everything under src/main/webapp. When you override it to specify

<packagingIncludes>css_${css}/**</packagingIncludes>

then the plugin will only include that folder (and everything under it) and not WEB-INF anymore. A simple solution is to re-include WEB-INF:

<packagingIncludes>WEB-INF/**,css_${css}/**</packagingIncludes>

With such a configuration, everything under WEB-INF and everything under css_${css} will be included in the war.

---

Another solution that does not require re-adding folders would be to use <packagingExcludes> instead. This way, all files under src/main/webapp will be included, except those that we specify here. In this case, we can use a regular expression that says: exclude everything that starts with css and is not css_${css}.

<packagingExcludes>%regex[css_(?!${css}/).*]</packagingExcludes>