Maven: Where to put generated resources for tomcat-maven-plugin?

Question

I have CSS and JavaScript files in src/main/webapp directory of my project. I want to join add joined and minified version of these resources to my WAR file and to the place where tomcat-maven-plugin picks it up.

I used yuicompressor-maven-plugin to create the files and put it to ${project.build.directory}/${project.build.finalName}. It works great for maven package and those resources make their way to WAR file, but somehow tomcat-maven-plugin does not see those at all. Should I use a different directory for it?

My pom:

    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
            <artifactId>tomcat-maven-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>1.1</version>
            <configuration>
                <path>/MyApp</path>
                <warDirectory>${project.build.directory}/${project.build.finalName}</warDirectory>
            </configuration>
        </plugin>
        <plugin>
            <version>2.5.1</version>
            <inherited>true</inherited>
            <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
            <configuration>
                <source>1.6</source>
                <target>1.6</target>
                <optimize>true</optimize>
                <debug>true</debug>
            </configuration>
        </plugin>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-resources-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>2.5</version>
            <configuration>
                <encoding>UTF-8</encoding>
            </configuration>
        </plugin>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>2.2</version>
            <configuration>
                <webResources>
                    <resource>
                        <directory>${basedir}/src/main/resources/META-INF</directory>
                        <filtering>true</filtering>
                        <targetPath>META-INF</targetPath>
                        <includes>
                            <include>context.xml</include>
                        </includes>
                    </resource>
                </webResources>
                <archive>
                    <addMavenDescriptor>false</addMavenDescriptor>
                    <manifest>
                        <addDefaultImplementationEntries>true</addDefaultImplementationEntries>
                        <addClasspath>true</addClasspath>
                    </manifest>
                </archive>
            </configuration>
        </plugin>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>net.alchim31.maven</groupId>
            <artifactId>yuicompressor-maven-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>1.3.0</version>
            <executions>
                <execution>
                    <phase>process-resources</phase>
                    <configuration>
                        <excludes>
                            <exclude>**/*</exclude>
                        </excludes>
                        <aggregations>
                            <aggregation>
                                <output>${project.build.directory}/${project.build.finalName}/js/commons-pack.js</output>
                                <includes>
                                    <include>${project.build.sourceDirectory}/../webapp/js1.js</include>
                                    <include>${project.build.sourceDirectory}/../webapp/js2.js</include>
                     ...

What should I do to make mvn tomcat:run to also pick up my generated files?

Answer 1

Use warSourceDirectory:

<warSourceDirectory>${project.build.directory}/${project.build.finalName}</warSourceDirectory>

Instead of this configuration property (warDirectory) for the tomcat-maven-plugin:

<warDirectory>${project.build.directory}/${project.build.finalName}</warDirectory>

According to the tomcat-maven-plugin documentation, warSourceDirectory is where the web resources get picked up, and its default value is ${basedir}/src/main/webapp. This means that if you don’t set that property, you need to generate your unified/minified JavaScript file under ${basedir}/src/main/webapp.

If you set warSourceDirectory to the output folder, this means you need to generate this file before starting Tomcat.