How to exclude pom.xml from Maven generated war?

Question

Using Maven war plugin, I generate WAR which includes following directory:

META-INF
-- maven
   -- com.abc.def
      -- myServlet
         -- pom.xml
         -- pom.properties

In release, I want to exclude this maven directory. How can I do that?

I tried latest maven-war-plugin (2.1-beta-1), it has configuration "packagingExcludes", but it doesn't work as I wish.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Using the standard Maven packaging you can't omit the file to my knowledge. It is possible however to use the maven-assembly-plugin to construct the war, in this case you have much finer grained control over the contents of the artifact, and can omit the pom.xml.

However I have personally found it useful to keep the pom.xml for diagnostic purposes. It can be handy to know what was used to build and assemble the war when trying to figure out what is wrong with your app.

Update: in a bizarre bit of synchronicity to Pascal's answer, I've just been reading up on the Archiver reference and it appears that this can be done by setting the addMavenDescriptor property to false. Personally I would still avoid doing this for reasons given above. But you may want to change your acceptance to Pascal's answer.

Answer 2

Putting a META-INF folder in a resources directory or in the root of your source directory will destroy the META-INF content created by Maven. For WAR files, putting a META-INF in your web content directory will do the same.

Adding other content to that custom META-INF will override what maven would create.

Answer 3

I'm not sure but I think that the Maven Archiver (which is mainly used by plugins to handle packaging) can be configured to achieve this.

About the <addMavenDescriptor> element, the Maven Archiver Reference says:

Whether the generated archive will contain these two Maven files:

• The pom file, located in the archive in META-INF/maven/${groupId}/${artifactId}/pom.xml
• A pom.properties file, located in the archive in META-INF/maven/${groupId}/${artifactId}/pom.properties

The default value is true.

So a pom configured like this should do the trick:

<project>
  ...
  <build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>2.0</version>
        <configuration>
          <archive>
            <addMavenDescriptor>false</addMavenDescriptor>
          </archive>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
      ...
    </plugins>
  </build>
  ...
</project>