wildfly-module-plugin/README.md

Inteligr8 Wildfly Module Plugin

This Maven plugin is designed to manage both Wildfly module projects and Wildfly deployment project integration with Wildfly modules.

Objective

A module is a set of libraries and directories that can be deployed to the Wildfly modules directory. A Wildfly module can be inherited by other modules and deployments. It provides the shared library idea implemented by most application servers.

Wildfly ships with several modules already installed. These are called system modules.

When creating a deployment, you can have it depend on these shared modules by declaring the module in your deployment descriptor. This means you should not include those libraries in your deployment. However, you still need those libraries for compile-time purposes. Those libraries should be treated as provided dependencies. Likewise, the same nuance applies to the development of custom modules.

This Maven plugin aims to resolve these packaging headaches.

Use

Wildfly System Module

Wildfly ships with several modules. It has a Maven BOM for all library version management, but not any segmentation of libraries by module. So in tandem with this plugin, another project was created for declaring Wildfly system modules: wildfly-system-modules. This allows a developer to reference a Wildfly system module as a provided dependency to their project.

These modules do not use this plugin. They are just an integral part of other modules and deployments.

Wildfly User Module

You can develop your own modules, use them privately, share them publicly in Maven, and/or use modules shared by others through Maven. The process is the same as using Wildfly system modules.

You can do this by including this plugin in your POM. There are 3 goals for modules:

Goal	Default Phase	Purpose
module-generate	generate-resources	Generates the module.xml file in the appropriate module directory. The file will enumerate all dependencies, either as resources or modules.
module-resources	prepare-package	Copies the non-module dependencies to the appropriate module directory.
module-package	package	ZIPs the module so it can be unzipped in the Wildfly modules directory.

All module projects must/may have the following properties:

Property	Required	Notes
wildfly.module.id	Yes	This determines the path of the module when installed and how it is referenced by other Wildfly component descriptors. It is transparent to other Maven projects during development.
wildfly.module.system	No	true or false; default false; This module is a Wildfly-provided system module.
wildfly.module.meta	No	true or false; default false; This module provides META-INF resources.
wildfly.module.services	No	true or false; default false; This module provides META-INF/services resources.
wildfly.module.annotations	No	true or false; default false; This module provides annotation actionable resources.
wildfly.module.outputDirectory	No	Default: target/wildfly-module

You will want to define the plugin as follows.

<plugin>
    <groupId>com.inteligr8.wildfly</groupId>
    <artifactId>wildfly-module-plugin</artifactId>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>module</id>
            <goals>
                <goal>module-generate</goal>
                <goal>module-resources</goal>
                <goal>module-package</goal>
            </goals>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

You could use Git to clone the module project down to the Wildfly server and use wildfly.module.outputDirectory to install modules directory into the Wildfly modules directory.

Wildfly Web Application Deployment

There is only one goal for this scenario:

Goal	Default Phase	Purpose
war	package	Generates the jboss-deployment-structure.xml file, copies the non-module dependencies, and creates the WAR package. This is a replacement for maven-war-plugin.

All deployment projects may have the following properties:

Property	Required	Notes
wildfly.deployment.outputDirectory	No	Default: target/${artifactId}-${version}
wildfly.webapp.directory	No	Default: src/main/webapp

You can also use the plugin configuration to define standard resources. You will find an example below.

<plugin>
    <groupId>com.inteligr8.wildfly</groupId>
    <artifactId>wildfly-module-plugin</artifactId>
    <configuration>
        <resources>
        	  <resource>
        	      <directory>src/wildfly/webapp</directory>
        	  </resource>
        </resources>
    </configuration>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>deployment</id>
            <goals>
                <goal>war</goal>
            </goals>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>
<plugin>
    <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>3.3.2</version>
    <configuration>
        <skip>true</skip>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

maven.war.skip does not work in the default maven-war-plugin version.

Wildfly Enterprise Application Deployment

This is stubbed out in the source, but not yet supported.