Sharing Resources in Maven

Today I needed to figure out the best way to share resources across multiple maven modules. We have previously done it 2 different ways, neither of which I thought were very good. The first way was using a relative path to reach across to the modules resource directory (usually not a good practice in maven). It went something like this:

    
        ../module1/src/main/resources
    

The second way was using the infamous maven assembly plugin. I typically avoid the assembly plugin like I avoid writing Assembly. Plus I prefer avoiding 100 extra lines of XML on something so trivial. Luckily, the Sonatype guys apparently knew this and have come up with a more efficient way of sharing resources using the maven-remote-resources-plugin. It has the advantages of requiring a lot less XML lifting and it's nicely integrated into the maven lifecycle. I did run into one small issue trying to get it to work. By default it only copies **/*.txt files from src/main/resources. For several minutes, I couldn't figure how why it wasn't working until I added an includes for **/*.xml. Then it worked perfectly. Here is the end result:

Creating a resource bundle
Add the following to your POM which is going to create the resource bundle.

      
    maven-remote-resources-plugin
    1.1
    
        
            
                bundle
            
            
                
                    **/*.xml
                
            
        
    

You now should see the following message in your mvn output while running mvn clean install.

[remote-resources:bundle {execution: default}]

This produces a /target/classes/META-INF/maven/remote-resources.xml file which contains references to the resource files. For example,

    test.xml

Consuming Resource Bundle
Add the following to the POM which needs to consume the new resource bundle.

      
    maven-remote-resources-plugin
    1.1
    
        
            
                process
            
            
                
                    com.lorenzen:lorenzen-core:${pom.version}
                
            
        
    

You now should see the following message in your mvn output while running mvn clean install.

[remote-resources:process {execution: default}]

You should now be able to look into your second modules /target/classes directory and see test.xml.