6.5. Offline mode

When you move from the development phase of a project to the deployment phase, it is typically more convenient to pre-install all of the artifacts required by your application, rather than downloading them from the Internet on demand. In this case, the ideal solution is to create a custom offline repository, which contains the artifacts needed for your deployment. Creating a custom offline repository by hand, however, would be difficult, because it would need to include all of the transitive dependencies associated with your application bundles and features.

The ideal way to create a custom offline repository is to generate it, with the help of the Apache Karaf features-maven-plugin plug-in.

If you have a Maven project and you need to create an offline repository for building this project and its runtime dependencies, you can use the maven dependency plugin.

For example, from the top-level directory of a Maven project (such that the current directory has a pom.xml file), you should be able to run the following Maven command:

mvn org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-dependency-plugin:2.8:go-offline -Dmaven.repo.local=/tmp/cheese

This downloads all the Maven dependencies and plug-ins required to build the project to the /tmp/cheese directory.

To generate the custom offline repository, open a new command prompt, change directory to ProjectDir/custom-repo, and enter the following Maven command:

mvn generate-resources

Assuming that the Maven build completes successfully, the custom offline repository should now be available in the following location:

ProjectDir/custom-repo/target/features-repo