How to FTP artifacts in maven2

If there is one word a team should keep in mind when building a CI (Continuous Integration) environment it's Automate, Automate, and Automate (see Production-ready software, on-demand). Most teams, including mine currently, performs their releases manually; creating the branch, incrementing the POMs, uploading the artifacts to a repository, etc. This is one reason I wrote about using the maven release plugin to automate this process. I will say that having a CI server such as Hudson only helps in making automation easier.

My team also creates an official release about once every two months and supports that release anywhere between 1-2 weeks to months. It's also pretty intense during those 1-2 weeks when we have co-workers on-site installing and supporting our software in a completely different timezone and with limited access to the phone and internet.

Over the weekend I wrote a simple maven2 pom to help automate FTP'ing the release artifacts to an FTP server. Last week we created a branch and a job in hudson that builds that branch. After it successfully builds we use the assembly plugin to package our EAR, documentation, SQL files, and everything else into a single folder. In the past, a guy would then manually copy these files to the FTP server, which was used by the on-site team to download the latest artifacts containing improvements and bug fixes. This release we wanted to automate this step to increase our response time for the on-site team.

First Try using GMaven Plugin
I knew that Ant had an FTP task and I love doing Ant in Groovy because its so much easier so I decided to first try the GMaven plugin (maven groovy plugin). It was a short trip since the FTP task is an optional library in Ant and you have to include the jar in your POM, but I could never get the gmaven plugin to recognize the dependency (see MGROOVY-152). Look at the Jira issue attachments if you want to reference my POM as an example. It's too bad I couldn't get this to work because it would have been sweet:

log.info('Entering in ftp script')

def config = [server: 'localhost',
   remotedir: '/home/jlorenzen/ftptest',
   user: 'ftp',
   password: 'ftp'
];

ant.ftp(config) {
   fileset(dir: '/home/jlorenzen/Documents')
}

Second Try Maven AntRun Plugin
I was finally able to get this to work using the maven-antrun-plugin. Here is my POM

<build>
  <plugins>
      <plugin>
          <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
          <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
          <executions>
              <execution>
                  <id>ftp</id>
                  <phase>install</phase>
                  <goals>
                      <goal>run</goal>
                  </goals>
                  <configuration>
                      <tasks>
                          <ftp server="localhost"
                                  remotedir="/home/jlorenzen/ftptest"
                                  userid="ftp"
                                  password="ftp">
                              <fileset dir="/home/jlorenzen/Documents"/>
                          </ftp>
                      </tasks>
                  </configuration>
              </execution>
          </executions>
          <dependencies>
              <dependency>
                  <groupId>ant</groupId>
                  <artifactId>ant-commons-net</artifactId>
                  <version>1.6.5</version>
              </dependency>
              <dependency>
                  <groupId>commons-net</groupId>
                  <artifactId>commons-net</artifactId>
                  <version>1.4.1</version>
              </dependency>
          </dependencies>
      </plugin>
  </plugins>
</build>