Chapter 2. Overview of JBoss EAP Maven plug-in

The JBoss EAP Maven plug-in uses Galleon provisioning mechanism to provision a server with only the required capabilities to reduce the size and memory footprint of the server. The JBoss EAP Maven plug-in provisions the server and deploys the packaged application to the provisioned server during the Maven execution.

You can package the provisioned server, with the application deployed, in the following ways:

You can also choose whether to deploy the application in the provisioned server by configuring one of the supported goals:

JBoss EAP Maven plug-in syntax

The following snippet shows the basic syntax for configuring the JBoss EAP maven plug-in in the pom.xml configuration file.

<plugins>
  <plugin>
    <groupId>org.jboss.eap.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>eap-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>${MavenPluginVersion}</version>             

    <configuration>
      <channels>
        <channel>
          <manifest>
            <groupId>org.jboss.eap.channels</groupId>    

            <artifactId>${channel_id}</artifactId>
          </manifest>
        </channel>
      </channels>
      <feature-packs>
        <feature-pack>
          <location>${featurepack_location}</location>   

        </feature-pack>
      </feature-packs>
      <layers>
        <layer>${layer_1_to_include}</layer>             

        ...
        <layer>${layer_N_to_include}</layer>
      </layers>
      <bootable-jar>${true_or_false}</bootable-jar>      

    </configuration>
    <executions>
      <execution>
        <goals>
          <goal>${provision_or_package}</goal>           

        </goals>
      </execution>
    </executions>
  </plugin>
</plugins>

For a complete list of configuration options, see JBoss EAP Maven plug-in configuration parameters.

A bootable JAR contains a server, a packaged application, and the runtime required to launch the server.

A bootable JAR is like a standard JBoss EAP server in the following ways:

The following limitations exist when packaging a server in a bootable JAR:

Additionally, you can provision a hollow bootable JAR. This JAR contains only the server, so you can reuse the server to run a different application.

Provisioning files are XML files with the name provisioning.xml that you can store in the galleon subdirectory. Using them is an alternative to configuring feature-packs and layers in the JBoss EAP Maven plug-in. You can configure provisioning.xml file to fine-tune the provisioning process.

The following code demonstrates a provisioning file content that you can use to provision JBoss EAP server based on the cloud-server layer.

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<installation xmlns="urn:jboss:galleon:provisioning:3.0">
    <feature-pack location="org.jboss.eap:wildfly-ee-galleon-pack:">

        <default-configs inherit="false"/>

        <packages inherit="false"/>

    </feature-pack>
    <feature-pack location="org.jboss.eap.cloud:eap-cloud-galleon-pack:
">

        <default-configs inherit="false"/>
        <packages inherit="false"/>
    </feature-pack>
    <config model="standalone" name="standalone.xml">

        <layers>
            <include name="cloud-server"/>
        </layers>
    </config>
    <options>

        <option name="optional-packages" value="passive+"/>
    </options>
</installation>