How to make maven place all jars common to wars inside the same EAR to EAR root?

Question

We have a solution with numerous wars. Wars are similar in the sense they all use hibernate and spring. This means that we have a number of same jars inside each war. This i

Answer 1

As you've mentioned in a comment, it's maven's task to calculate every dependency. When you're creating an artifact, with every common dependency, then you'll also have to guess, which dependencies belong there.

It could also be possible, that you have to deploy one war, with it's dependencies on another machine without an ear, an when you set every war dependency to provided, then you're stuck again.

The only right way, to get skinny wars is from the examples: http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-war-plugin/examples/skinny-wars.html

But, and now comes the interesting part, there is one big! shortcut (which completly takes away the mentioned pain), to tell maven, which dependencies your WARs have.

Go inside your EAR-Module an declare a second dependency on the WAR with type pom for every WAR dependency.

4.0.0

    com.foo
    skinny
    0.0.1-SNAPSHOT

ear
ear

    
        com.foo
        war
        0.0.1-SNAPSHOT
        war
    
    
        com.foo
        war
        0.0.1-SNAPSHOT
        pom
    


    
        
            org.apache.maven.plugins
            maven-ear-plugin
            2.8
            
                true
                lib
                
                    
                        com.foo
                        war
                    
                
            
        
    

Now, every WAR will be packaged independently with it's own dependencies and the EAR will be packaged with skinny WARs and every dependency inside the lib folder

Update:

Keep in mind, that the ear/lib folder can't be used for every dependency jar in a strict Container like JBoss EAP 6. JSF Component libraries like tomahawk, primefaces, etc. have to reside in WEB-INF/lib folder.

A handy way to achieve this with the above described solution is to make an exclusion for the component library in the EARs pom.xml like this:

...

    
        com.foo
        war
        0.0.1-SNAPSHOT
        war
    
    
        com.foo
        war
        0.0.1-SNAPSHOT
        pom
        
            
                org.primefaces
                primefaces
            
        
    

...

Now every dependency of the WAR will be placed in ear/lib except the component library which will be placed in WEB-INF/lib inside the WAR