How to create a vertx mod from your Maven project.
So you want to package your vertx application into a module and then make it available in some vertx repository to automatically download. How do you do that? If you are using Gradle for your build, check out all the mods that vertx has already created to examples, then copy and paste and change to your project.
But there aren’t any out there with maven as a build. Well, Brian Lalor does have a maven build for his amqp module, and that is exactly where I stole this information from. Now in his project, as of today, it creates a tar.gz file, I want to create a zip, that I can then copy to my mod repository and rename to mod.zip.
So what are we going to do? Well, for our project I decided to use the maven assembly plugin, maven-assembly-plugin. And create an xml file that declared that I wanted a zip file, what jar dependencies to copy over into a lib directory and where my mod.json file was located, as well as any other scripts or code that wasn’t already being packaged into a jar file by the build. Then in the maven-assembly-plugin, point it to the xml file with that configuration.
First lets look at the maven assembly plugin entry in our pom file.
<plugin> <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId> <artifactId>maven-assembly-plugin</artifactId> <version>2.3</version> <configuration> <descriptors> <descriptor>src/main/assembly/mod.xml</descriptor> </descriptors> </configuration> <executions> <execution> <id>assemble</id> <phase>package</phase> <goals> <goal>single</goal> </goals> </execution> </executions> </plugin>
This declares the plugin, in the configuration section points to where I will have my xml file, and finally the execution, so that when I run package or beyond that the assembly is done.
So that just leaves us with this mod.xml file thingy. let’s take a look at it. (I create a property in the pom.xml file called
<module-directory>${project.groupId}.${project.artifactId}-v${project.version}</module-directory>
This way can use the property to tell the mod.xml locations to place my vertx module code and stuff.
Now the mod.xml file
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<assembly xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-assembly-plugin/assembly/1.1.2"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="
http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-assembly-plugin/assembly/1.1.2 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/assembly-1.1.2.xsd
">
<id>mod</id>
<formats>
<format>zip</format>
</formats>
<baseDirectory>mods</baseDirectory>
<dependencySets>
<dependencySet>
<outputDirectory>${module-directory}/lib</outputDirectory>
</dependencySet>
</dependencySets>
<fileSets>
<fileSet>
<outputDirectory></outputDirectory>
<directory>src/main/resources</directory>
<includes>
<include>amqp-busmod#1.2.0-SNAPSHOT/**</include>
</includes>
</fileSet>
<fileSet>
<!-- empty outputDirectory puts mod.json at the root of the structure -->
<outputDirectory>${module-directory}</outputDirectory>
<directory>src/main/resources</directory>
<includes>
<include>mod.json</include>
</includes>
</fileSet>
<fileSet>
<outputDirectory>${module-directory}</outputDirectory>
<directory>scripts</directory>
<includes>
<include>**</include>
</includes>
</fileSet>
</fileSets>
</assembly>
WHOA!!!! That’s a lot. But most is boilerplate.
First the id will be appended to the name of the zip file it creates. Now it creates a zip file because of the formats/format section. That is simple.
Now in vertx mods are put into a subdirectory called mods. So in the baseDirectory tag we tell it to put all our files down one level in the zip file, so that the root level in the zip is “mods”
The dependencySets section is just telling where the jar files should be copied to. In this case the module’s directory, but in a lib subdirectory of it. Basically mods/{module-directory}/lib
And the last part is the fun part. This is where we tell the assembly which of our files we want in the module directory, or if we are using other modules where to find those modules and copy those directly into the mods directory. This is the fileSets section
So in my mod.xml I am using Brian’s amqp module (the same one I stole from) and I downloaded it locally and put it in my src/main/resources directory. I am actually also using the MongoDBPersistor module, but I am going to get that from the vertx central repository when I actually run my module. So the fileSet for that has an empty outputDirectory, which means it will be copied into the baseDirectory setting which is set to mods directory.
The second fileSet is for my mod.json, which is required for a vertx module and tells vertx the main script/class and maybe some other configuration.
And finally the last fileSet is my actual verticle code. I am using Groovy scripts, so I created a scripts directory off the root of my project’s directory and placed my Groovy scripts there, in my case there are actually 5 Groovy script files; 1 verticle, 2 worker verticle, 1 main app script to deployVerticle, deployMod etc, and one Groovy config file. The last is not necessary, but will also be part of another blog post for vertx using environment configurations. But I haven’t gotten that to work yet. ANYWAY, since I have a few files in this scripts directory I just use the ant style “**” wildcards to say take everything in that scripts directory and also copy those to my module’s directory. So in the mods/{module-directory/ directory.
Now when I do mvn package, I look in the target directory when it is done and I see a zip file with my module name on it with “-mod.zip” at the end.
So what I usually do next is unzip that file directly in the target directory so I can run my module directly from the target directory and test away.
Due to complete ass wipe spammers, I have to turn off comments and trackbacks.
