14.6. Automated Deployment

Overview

The Maven proxy supports not just downloading artifacts, but also uploading artifacts. Hence, if you want to make an artifact available to all of the containers in the fabric, a simple way of doing this is to upload the artifact to the Maven proxy. For ultimate convenience in a development environment, you can automate the deployment step by installing the Fabric8 Maven plug-in in your project POM file.

Discover the upload URL of the current master

To discover the upload URL of the current Maven proxy master instance, invoke the fabric:cluster-list command, as follows: 
JBossFuse:karaf@root> cluster-list servlets/io.fabric8.fabric-maven-proxy
[cluster]                           [masters]  [slaves]  [services]                            []
1.2.0.redhat-621084/maven/download                                                               
   root                             root       -         http://127.0.0.1:8181/maven/download    
1.2.0.redhat-621084/maven/upload                                                                 
   root                             root       -         http://127.0.0.1:8181/maven/upload
In this example, the upload URL of the current master is http://127.0.0.1:8181/maven/upload.

Manually deploy a Maven project

You can build a Maven project and upload the resulting artifact directly to the Maven proxy server, by invoking mvn deploy with the altDeploymentRepository command-line option. The value of altDeploymentRepository is specified in the following format: 
ID::Layout::RepositoryURL
Where the format segments can be explained as follows:
ID
Can be used to pick up the relevant credentials from the settings.xml file (from the matching settings/servers/server/id element). Otherwise, the credentials must be specified in the repository URL. If necessary, you can simply specify a dummy value for the ID.
Layout
Can be either default (for Maven3 or Maven2) or legacy (for Maven1, which is not compatible with JBoss A-MQ).
RepositoryURL
The Maven proxy upload URL. For example, http://User:Password@localhost:8181/maven/upload/.
For example, to deploy a Maven project to a Maven proxy server running on the localhost (127.0.0.1), authenticating with the admin/admin credentials, enter a command like the following: 
mvn deploy -DaltDeploymentRepository=releaseRepository::default::http://admin:admin@127.0.0.1:8181/maven/upload/

Automatically deploy a Maven project

When working in a build environment, the most convenient way to interact with the Maven proxy server is to configure the Fabric8 Maven plug-in. The Fabric8 Maven plug-in can automatically deploy your project to the local Maven proxy and, in addition, has the capability to create or update a Fabric profile for your application. For more details, see Chapter 7, Fabric8 Maven Plug-In.