Chapter 12. Maven settings and repositories for Red Hat Decision Manager

When you create a Red Hat Decision Manager project, Business Central uses the Maven repositories that are configured for Business Central. You can use the Maven global or user settings to direct all Red Hat Decision Manager projects to retrieve dependencies from the public Red Hat Decision Manager repository by modifying the Maven project object model (POM) file (pom.xml). You can also configure Business Central and Decision Server to use an external Maven repository or prepare a Maven mirror for offline use.

For more information about Red Hat Decision Manager packaging and deployment options, see Packaging and deploying a Red Hat Decision Manager project.

12.1. Adding Maven dependencies for Red Hat Decision Manager

To use the correct Maven dependencies in your Red Hat Decision Manager project, add the Red Hat Business Automation bill of materials (BOM) files to the project’s pom.xml file. The Red Hat Business Automation BOM applies to both Red Hat Decision Manager and Red Hat Process Automation Manager. When you add the BOM files, the correct versions of transitive dependencies from the provided Maven repositories are included in the project.

For more information about the Red Hat Business Automation BOM, see What is the mapping between Red Hat Decision Manager and the Maven library version?.

Procedure

  1. Declare the Red Hat Business Automation BOM in the pom.xml file:

    <dependencyManagement>
     <dependencies>
      <dependency>
       <groupId>com.redhat.ba</groupId>
       <artifactId>ba-platform-bom</artifactId>
       <version>7.4.0.GA-redhat-00002</version>
       <type>pom</type>
       <scope>import</scope>
      </dependency>
     </dependencies>
    </dependencyManagement>
    <dependencies>
    <!-- Your dependencies -->
    </dependencies>
  2. Declare dependencies required for your project in the <dependencies> tag. After you import the product BOM into your project, the versions of the user-facing product dependencies are defined so you do not need to specify the <version> sub-element of these <dependency> elements. However, you must use the <dependency> element to declare dependencies which you want to use in your project.
  3. For standalone projects that are not authored in Business Central, specify all dependencies required for your projects. In projects that you author in Business Central, the basic decision engine dependencies are provided automatically by Business Central.

    • For a basic Red Hat Decision Manager project, declare the following dependencies, depending on the features that you want to use:
    • For a basic Red Hat Decision Manager project, declare the following dependencies:

      Embedded decision engine dependencies

      <dependency>
        <groupId>org.drools</groupId>
        <artifactId>drools-compiler</artifactId>
      </dependency>
      
      <!-- Dependency for persistence support. -->
      <dependency>
        <groupId>org.drools</groupId>
        <artifactId>drools-persistence-jpa</artifactId>
      </dependency>
      
      <!-- Dependencies for decision tables, templates, and scorecards.
      For other assets, declare org.drools:business-central-models-* dependencies. -->
      <dependency>
        <groupId>org.drools</groupId>
        <artifactId>drools-decisiontables</artifactId>
      </dependency>
      <dependency>
        <groupId>org.drools</groupId>
        <artifactId>drools-templates</artifactId>
      </dependency>
      <dependency>
        <groupId>org.drools</groupId>
        <artifactId>drools-scorecards</artifactId>
      </dependency>
      
      <!-- Dependency for loading KJARs from a Maven repository using KieScanner. -->
      <dependency>
        <groupId>org.kie</groupId>
        <artifactId>kie-ci</artifactId>
      </dependency>

    • To use the Decision Server, declare the following dependencies:

      Client application Decision Server dependencies

      <dependency>
        <groupId>org.kie.server</groupId>
        <artifactId>kie-server-client</artifactId>
      </dependency>

    • To create a remote client for Red Hat Decision Manager, declare the following dependency:

      Client dependency

      <dependency>
        <groupId>org.uberfire</groupId>
        <artifactId>uberfire-rest-client</artifactId>
      </dependency>

    • When creating a JAR file that includes assets, such as rules and process definitions, specify the packaging type for your Maven project as kjar and use org.kie:kie-maven-plugin to process the kjar packaging type located under the <project> element. In the following example, ${kie.version} is the Maven library version listed in What is the mapping between Red Hat Decision Manager and the Maven library version?:

      <packaging>kjar</packaging>
      <build>
       <plugins>
        <plugin>
         <groupId>org.kie</groupId>
         <artifactId>kie-maven-plugin</artifactId>
         <version>${kie.version}</version>
         <extensions>true</extensions>
        </plugin>
       </plugins>
      </build>

12.2. Configuring an external Maven repository for Business Central and Decision Server

You can configure Business Central and Decision Server to use an external Maven repository, such as Nexus or Artifactory, instead of the built-in repository. This enables Business Central and Decision Server to access and download artifacts that are maintained in the external Maven repository.

Important

"Artifacts in the repository do not receive automated security patches as Maven requires that artifacts be immutable. As a result, artifacts that are missing patches for known security flaws will remain in the repository to avoid breaking builds that depend on them. Patched artifacts have their version number incremented". For more information, see JBoss Enterprise Maven Repository.

Note

For information about configuring an external Maven repository for an authoring environment on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, see the following documents:

Prerequisites

Procedure

  1. Create a Maven settings.xml file with connection and access details for your external repository. For details about the settings.xml file, see the Maven Settings Reference.
  2. Save the file in a known location, for example, /opt/custom-config/settings.xml.
  3. In your Red Hat Decision Manager installation directory, navigate to the standalone-full.xml file. For example, if you use a Red Hat JBoss EAP installation for Red Hat Decision Manager, go to $EAP_HOME/standalone/configuration/standalone-full.xml.
  4. Open standalone-full.xml and under the <system-properties> tag, set the kie.maven.settings.custom property to the full path name of the settings.xml file.

    For example:

    <property name="kie.maven.settings.custom" value="/opt/custom-config/settings.xml"/>
  5. Start or restart Business Central and Decision Server.

Next steps

For each Business Central project that you want to export or push as a KJAR artifact to the external Maven repository, you must add the repository information in the project pom.xml file. For instructions, see Packaging and deploying a Red Hat Decision Manager project.

12.3. Preparing a Maven mirror repository for offline use

If your Red Hat Decision Manager deployment does not have outgoing access to the public Internet, you must prepare a Maven repository with a mirror of all the necessary artifacts and make this repository available to your environment.

Note

You do not need to complete this procedure if your Red Hat Decision Manager deployment is connected to the Internet.

Prerequisites

  • A computer that has outgoing access to the public Internet is available.

Procedure

  1. On the computer that has an outgoing connection to the public Internet, complete the following steps:

    1. Download the latest version of the Offliner tool.
    2. Download the rhdm-7.4.0-offliner.txt product deliverable file from the Software Downloads page of the Red Hat Customer Portal.
    3. Enter the following command to use the Offliner tool to download the required artifacts:

      java -jar offliner-<version>.jar -r https://maven.repository.redhat.com/ga/ -r https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/ -d /home/user/temp rhdm-7.4.0-offliner.txt

      Replace /home/user/temp with an empty temporary directory and <version> with the version of the Offliner tool that you downloaded. The download can take a significant amount of time.

    4. If the tool reports failed downloads, enter the following commands to download the artifacts that failed to download the first time:

      grep Path: errors.log | sed -n -e 's/^.*Path: //p' > failed-downloads.txt
      java -jar offliner-<version>.jar -r https://maven.repository.redhat.com/ga/ -r https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/ -d /home/user/temp failed-downloads.txt

      If failures are reported again and are a minority of the total number downloaded the first time, you can proceed.

  2. If you developed services outside Business Central and they have additional dependencies, add the dependencies to the mirror repository. If you developed the services as Maven projects, you can use the following steps to prepare these dependencies automatically. Complete the steps on the computer that has an outgoing connection to the public Internet.

    1. Create a backup of the local Maven cache directory (~/.m2/repository) and then clear the directory.
    2. Build the source of your projects using the mvn clean install command.
    3. For every project, enter the following command to ensure that Maven downloads all runtime dependencies for all the artifacts generated by the project:

      mvn -e -DskipTests dependency:go-offline -f /path/to/project/pom.xml --batch-mode -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true

      Replace /path/to/project/pom.xml with the correct path to the pom.xml file of the project.

    4. Copy the contents of the local Maven cache directory (~/.m2/repository) to the temporary directory that you are using.
  3. Copy the contents of the temporary directory to a directory on the computer on which you deployed Red Hat Decision Manager. This directory becomes the offline Maven mirror repository.
  4. Create and configure a settings.xml file for your Red Hat Decision Manager deployment, according to instructions in Section 12.2, “Configuring an external Maven repository for Business Central and Decision Server”.
  5. Make the following changes in the settings.xml file:

    • Under the <profile> tag, if a <repositories> or <pluginRepositores> tag is absent, add the tags as necessary.
    • Under <repositories> add the following sequence:

      <repository>
        <id>offline-repository</id>
        <url>file:///path/to/repo</url>
        <releases>
          <enabled>true</enabled>
        </releases>
        <snapshots>
          <enabled>false</enabled>
        </snapshots>
      </repository>

      Replace /path/to/repo with the full path to the local Maven mirror repository directory.

    • Under <pluginRepositories> add the following sequence:

      <repository>
        <id>offline-plugin-repository</id>
        <url>file:///path/to/repo</url>
        <releases>
          <enabled>true</enabled>
        </releases>
        <snapshots>
          <enabled>false</enabled>
        </snapshots>
      </repository>

      Replace /path/to/repo with the full path to the local Maven mirror repository directory.

  6. Set the kie.maven.offline.force property for Business Central to true. For instructions about setting properties for Business Central, see Section 11.1, “Supported properties”.