Remove file from dependency jar using maven

Question

I am trying to remove a file from a dependency jar that I am including in my war file in maven. I am deploying the war to JBoss 5.1 and the jar in question contains a persistence.xml file that I don't want.

Here's what is going on:

my-webapp.war
|
`-- WEB-INF
    |
    `-- lib
        |
        `-- dependency.jar
            |
            `-- META-INF
                |
                `-- persistence.xml

When I am building my war, I want to remove persistence.xml Any one have any idea if this can be done easily?

Answer 1

I don't believe this is possible. You can exclude dependent jars (see this), but not specific files in dependent jars.

Answer 2

Not available out of the box AFAIK, you'll have to use the Maven AntRun plugin after package to do a few dirty things:

• unzip the war in a temp directory
• unzip the dependency in another temp directory
• delete the file from the dependency
• zip the temp directory of the dependency back into a jar
• move the dependency back in the temp directory of the war
• zip the temp directory of the webapp back into a war
• delete the temp directory of the dependency
• delete the temp directory of the webapp

The following resources might help

• ant task to remove files from a jar
• RE: Removing a file from .jar file

---

Now, if the problem is that JBoss is deploying the persistence unit defined in the persistence.xml (and you don't want that), there might be a better solution. It seems that you can declare files to ignore in a jboss-ignore.txt file, for example:

WEB-INF/lib/dependency.jar/META-INF/persistence.xml

The feature is there, but I've never used it.

See

• Excluding persistence.xml from deployment
• JBoss5 custom metadata files

Answer 3

I guess you would have to use the maven shade plugin (see link below)

Either build an Über-jar that includes your dependency minus the persistence-xml or just transform the dependency into something new that does not have the persistence.xml.

This should be the way to go:

http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-shade-plugin/examples/resource-transformers.html

Sean