How to make jetty-maven-plugin deploy a war that is retrieved from a repository? - maven-2

Question

I'm setting up an integration test module for a good sized web project. The integration test module is separated from the web project itself, and it has it's own pom.
The idea is to use the maven-soapui-plugin to send requests and verify the response. Setting up the soapui-plugin is no hassle. However, I'm having trouble with figuring out how I can tell the jetty-maven-plugin to deploy a war from a remote repository.
If I have understood correctly, the jetty-maven-plugin has a property called '<webApp>/<webApp>' which lets me specify the war file to deploy. The problem is that the war file is not present in the module itself.
I have heard that I can use the maven assembly plugin to retrieve the war from a repository via the projects artifactId, but I am yet to figure out how I would go about doing so.
Here's a summary of what I want:
Retrieve a specific war from a repository or the like, in example via its artifactId.
Deploy this war to the jetty-maven-plugin (goal deploy-war?)
get maven-soapui-plugin to run tests and report the results back in the integration-test phase.
I am pretty sure I've got step 3 covered, but I am very unsure how to achieve step 1 and 2.
Any help is greatly appreciated

Answer 1

It is maybe possible to use dependency:copy to retrieve the war, unpack it and to get the whole thing working with the maven jetty plugin, but this would be hacky and kinda ugly. A cleaner solution would be to use the Maven Cargo plugin and this is my suggestion. Below, a sample POM showing how to retrieve a WAR artifact using its coordinates and how to deploy it on an embedded Jetty container using Cargo:
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>war group id</groupId>
<artifactId>war artifact id</artifactId>
<type>war</type>
<version>war version</version>
</dependency>
...
</dependencies>
...
<build>
<plugins>
<plugin>
<groupId>org.codehaus.cargo</groupId>
<artifactId>cargo-maven2-plugin</artifactId>
<configuration>
<!-- Container configuration -->
<container>
<containerId>jetty6x</containerId>
<type>embedded</type>
</container>
<!-- Configuration to use with the container or the deployer -->
<configuration>
<deployables>
<deployable>
<groupId>war group id</groupId>
<artifactId>war artifact id</artifactId>
<type>war</type>
<properties>
<context>war context</context>
</properties>
</deployable>
</deployables>
</configuration>
<!-- Don't wait, execute the tests after the container is started -->
<wait>false</wait>
</configuration>
<executions>
<execution>
<id>start-container</id>
<phase>pre-integration-test</phase>
<goals>
<goal>start</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
<execution>
<id>stop-container</id>
<phase>post-integration-test</phase>
<goals>
<goal>stop</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>
...
</plugins>
...
</build>
Finally, just bind the soapui plugin on the integration-test phase.

Answer 2

I'm doing the same thing, John, but I took a different approach with the Jetty plugin. I think the end result is the same. I'm developing an integration-test suite to run against several web service WARs. I'm using dependency:copy in the package phase and then a list of <contextHandler/>s configured for maven-jetty-plugin:
<project>
…
<build>
<plugins>
<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-dependency-plugin</artifactId>
<executions>
<execution>
<id>copy-wars</id>
<phase>package</phase>
<goals>
<goal>copy</goal>
</goals>
<configuration>
<outputDirectory>${project.build.directory}/wars-to-be-tested</outputDirectory>
<stripVersion>true</stripVersion>
<artifactItems>
…
<artifactItem>
<groupId>groupId</groupId>
<artifactId>artifactId</artifactId>
<version>version</version>
<type>war</type>
</artifactItem>
…
</artifactItems>
</configuration>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>
<plugin>
<groupId>org.mortbay.jetty</groupId>
<artifactId>jetty-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<version>7.1.3.v20100526</version>
<configuration>
…
<contextHandlers>
…
<contextHandler implementation="org.mortbay.jetty.plugin.JettyWebAppContext">
<war>${project.build.directory}/wars-to-be-tested/artifactId.war</war>
<contextPath>/context</contextPath>
</contextHandler>
</contextHandlers>
</configuration>
<executions>
<execution>
<id>start-jetty</id>
<phase>pre-integration-test</phase>
<goals>
<goal>stop</goal>
<goal>run</goal>
</goals>
<configuration>
<scanIntervalSeconds>0</scanIntervalSeconds>
<daemon>true</daemon>
</configuration>
</execution>
<execution>
<id>stop-jetty</id>
<phase>post-integration-test</phase>
<goals>
<goal>stop</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>
</plugins>
</build>
</project>
I would prefer to declare the various wars as dependencies and then use dependency:copy-dependencies to set up the wars-to-be-tested directory; this would allow the Maven reactor to figure out that it needs to build my integration-test module after the wars it'll be testing. The problem I ran into was that the Jetty plugin thought that I wanted to "overlay" all of the wars that were listed as dependencies (a concept that I'd never even heard of until I saw it happen); I don't know if allowing that to happen would have hurt anything, but I didn't like it, so I went with the dependency:copy method.
This is just an alternative to using Cargo. I'll be looking into that myself, but I just wanted to provide another way of doing it.