Chapter 3. Setting up Maven locally

Typical Fuse application development uses Maven to build and manage projects.

The following topics describe how to set up Maven locally:

3.1. Preparing to set up Maven

Maven is a free, open source, build tool from Apache. Typically, you use Maven to build Fuse applications.

Procedure

  1. Download the latest version of Maven from the Maven download page.

  2. Ensure that your system is connected to the Internet.

    While building a project, the default behavior is that Maven searches external repositories and downloads the required artifacts. Maven looks for repositories that are accessible over the Internet.

    You can change this behavior so that Maven searches only repositories that are on a local network. That is, Maven can run in an offline mode. In offline mode, Maven looks for artifacts in its local repository. See Section 3.3, “Using local Maven repositories”.

3.2. Adding Red Hat repositories to Maven

To access artifacts that are in Red Hat Maven repositories, you need to add those repositories to Maven’s settings.xml file. Maven looks for the settings.xml file in the .m2 directory of the user’s home directory. If there is not a user specified settings.xml file, Maven uses the system-level settings.xml file at M2_HOME/conf/settings.xml.

Prerequisite

You know the location of the settings.xml file in which you want to add the Red Hat repositories.

Procedure

In the settings.xml file, add repository elements for the Red Hat repositories as shown in this example: 

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<settings>

  <profiles>
    <profile>
      <id>extra-repos</id>
      <activation>
        <activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>
      </activation>
      <repositories>
       <repository>
            <id>redhat-ga-repository</id>
            <url>https://maven.repository.redhat.com/ga</url>
            <releases>
                <enabled>true</enabled>
            </releases>
            <snapshots>
                <enabled>false</enabled>
            </snapshots>
        </repository>
        <repository>
            <id>redhat-ea-repository</id>
            <url>https://maven.repository.redhat.com/earlyaccess/all</url>
            <releases>
                <enabled>true</enabled>
            </releases>
            <snapshots>
                <enabled>false</enabled>
            </snapshots>
        </repository>
        <repository>
          <id>jboss-public</id>
          <name>JBoss Public Repository Group</name>
          <url>https://repository.jboss.org/nexus/content/groups/public/</url>
        </repository>
      </repositories>
      <pluginRepositories>
        <pluginRepository>
            <id>redhat-ga-repository</id>
            <url>https://maven.repository.redhat.com/ga</url>
            <releases>
                <enabled>true</enabled>
            </releases>
            <snapshots>
                <enabled>false</enabled>
            </snapshots>
        </pluginRepository>
        <pluginRepository>
            <id>redhat-ea-repository</id>
            <url>https://maven.repository.redhat.com/earlyaccess/all</url>
            <releases>
                <enabled>true</enabled>
            </releases>
            <snapshots>
                <enabled>false</enabled>
            </snapshots>
        </pluginRepository>
        <pluginRepository>
          <id>jboss-public</id>
          <name>JBoss Public Repository Group</name>
          <url>https://repository.jboss.org/nexus/content/groups/public</url>
        </pluginRepository>
      </pluginRepositories>
    </profile>
  </profiles>

  <activeProfiles>
    <activeProfile>extra-repos</activeProfile>
  </activeProfiles>

</settings>

3.3. Using local Maven repositories

If you are running a container without an Internet connection, and you need to deploy an application that has dependencies that are not available offline, you can use the Maven dependency plug-in to download the application’s dependencies into a Maven offline repository. You can then distribute this customized Maven offline repository to machines that do not have an Internet connection.

Procedure

  1. In the project directory that contains the pom.xml file, download a repository for a Maven project by running a command such as the following: 

    mvn org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-dependency-plugin:3.1.0:go-offline -Dmaven.repo.local=/tmp/my-project

    In this example, Maven dependencies and plug-ins that are required to build the project are downloaded to the /tmp/my-project directory.

  2. Distribute this customized Maven offline repository internally to any machines that do not have an Internet connection.

3.4. Setting Maven mirror using environmental variables or system properties

When running the applications you need access to the artifacts that are in the Red Hat Maven repositories. These repositories are added to Maven’s settings.xml file. Maven checks the following locations for settings.xml file:

  • looks for the specified url
  • if not found looks for ${user.home}/.m2/settings.xml
  • if not found looks for ${maven.home}/conf/settings.xml
  • if not found looks for ${M2_HOME}/conf/settings.xml
  • if no location is found, empty org.apache.maven.settings.Settings instance is created.

3.4.1. About Maven mirror

Maven uses a set of remote repositories to access the artifacts, which are currently not available in local repository. The list of repositories almost always contains Maven Central repository, but for Red Hat Fuse, it also contains Maven Red Hat repositories. In some cases where it is not possible or allowed to access different remote repositories, you can use a mechanism of Maven mirrors. A mirror replaces a particular repository URL with a different one, so all HTTP traffic when remote artifacts are being searched for can be directed to a single URL.

3.4.2. Adding Maven mirror to settings.xml

To set the Maven mirror, add the following section to Maven’s settings.xml: 

<mirror>
      <id>all</id>
      <mirrorOf>*</mirrorOf>
      <url>http://host:port/path</url>
</mirror>

No mirror is used if the above section is not found in the settings.xml file. To specify a global mirror without providing the XML configuration, you can use either system property or environmental variables.

3.4.3. Setting Maven mirror using environmental variable or system property

To set the Maven mirror using either environmental variable or system property, you can add:

  • Environmental variable called MAVEN_MIRROR_URL to bin/setenv file
  • System property called mavenMirrorUrl to etc/system.properties file

3.4.4. Using Maven options to specify Maven mirror url

To use an alternate Maven mirror url, other than the one specified by environmental variables or system property, use the following maven options when running the application:

  • -DmavenMirrorUrl=mirrorId::mirrorUrl

    for example, -DmavenMirrorUrl=my-mirror::http://mirror.net/repository

  • -DmavenMirrorUrl=mirrorUrl

    for example, -DmavenMirrorUrl=http://mirror.net/repository. In this example, the <id> of the <mirror> is just a mirror.

3.5. About Maven artifacts and coordinates

In the Maven build system, the basic building block is an artifact. After a build, the output of an artifact is typically an archive, such as a JAR or WAR file.

A key aspect of Maven is the ability to locate artifacts and manage the dependencies between them. A Maven coordinate is a set of values that identifies the location of a particular artifact. A basic coordinate has three values in the following form:

groupId:artifactId:version

Sometimes Maven augments a basic coordinate with a packaging value or with both a packaging value and a classifier value. A Maven coordinate can have any one of the following forms: 

groupId:artifactId:version
groupId:artifactId:packaging:version
groupId:artifactId:packaging:classifier:version

Here are descriptions of the values:

groupdId
Defines a scope for the name of the artifact. You would typically use all or part of a package name as a group ID. For example, org.fusesource.example.
artifactId
Defines the artifact name relative to the group ID.
version
Specifies the artifact’s version. A version number can have up to four parts: n.n.n.n, where the last part of the version number can contain non-numeric characters. For example, the last part of 1.0-SNAPSHOT is the alphanumeric substring, 0-SNAPSHOT.
packaging
Defines the packaged entity that is produced when you build the project. For OSGi projects, the packaging is bundle. The default value is jar.
classifier
Enables you to distinguish between artifacts that were built from the same POM, but have different content.

Elements in an artifact’s POM file define the artifact’s group ID, artifact ID, packaging, and version, as shown here: 

<project ... >
  ...
  <groupId>org.fusesource.example</groupId>
  <artifactId>bundle-demo</artifactId>
  <packaging>bundle</packaging>
  <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
  ...
</project>

To define a dependency on the preceding artifact, you would add the following dependency element to a POM file: 

<project ... >
  ...
  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.fusesource.example</groupId>
      <artifactId>bundle-demo</artifactId>
      <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
  ...
</project>
Note

It is not necessary to specify the bundle package type in the preceding dependency, because a bundle is just a particular kind of JAR file and jar is the default Maven package type. If you do need to specify the packaging type explicitly in a dependency, however, you can use the type element.