Using the Groovy Maven plugin to do magic

Recently, we had an issue that came up with creating our EAR for our web applications. We were trying to package up individual WARs in an EAR so they could share the same libraries and such and only load stuff used between them once, to save on memory.

We had it working great and then something ridiculous happened that caused WARs with their complete libraries (as opposed to stripped-down ones) to be included in the EAR, for no apparent reason. This caused a number of headaches and issues with the application, that we didn’t know until it was deployed, because we failed to recognize that the EAR had nearly doubled in size.

You may be wondering, “Hey, I just read two of your dumb paragraphs and I haven’t seen the word ‘groovy’, ‘maven’, ‘magic’, or ‘using’ yet.” Well, wouldn’t it have been nice if we knew instantly that the EAR had grown, when trying to build? That’s where the using the groovy maven magic plugin can help!

My co-worker James and I attempted to use the maven enforcer plugin, but it would have taken too much work and we would have needed to write a custom plugin for it to check the size of the EAR. So we decided to do it with Groovy. Here’s the code:

<plugin>
  <groupid>org.codehaus.mojo.groovy</groupid>
  <artifactid>groovy-maven-plugin</artifactid>
  <version>1.0-beta-4-SNAPSHOT</version>
  <executions>
    <execution>
      <phase>verify</phase>
      <goals>
        <goal>execute</goal>
      </goals>
      <configuration>
        <source>
 
          def ear = new File("$pom.basedir/target/${project.artifactId}-${project.version}.${project.packaging}")
          log.info("${ear?.length()}");
          def maxsize = project.properties['ear.maxsize'];
          if (ear?.length() > maxsize?.toInteger()) {
            fail("EAR Exceeds maximum size allowed.");
          }
        </source>
      </configuration>
    </execution>
  </executions>
</plugin>

This beginning part essentially defines the groovy plugin, and states run the code during the maven’s “verify” phase, so we know that the EAR is already created:

<plugin>
  <groupid>org.codehaus.mojo.groovy</groupid>
  <artifactid>groovy-maven-plugin</artifactid>
  <version>1.0-beta-4-SNAPSHOT</version>
  <executions>
    <execution>
      <phase>verify</phase>
      <goals>
        <goal>execute</goal>
      </goals>
</execution></executions></plugin>

The groovy code is really straight forward. First we get a reference to the file:

    def ear = new File("$pom.basedir/target/${project.artifactId}-${project.version}.${project.packaging}");
    log.info("${ear?.length()}");

We’re using variables defined directly in the POM, so we know the name of the file. We also print the length of the file out, for sanity’s sake. Next we get the max size value:

    def maxsize = project.properties['ear.maxsize'];

This is defined later in the pom.xml file, under properties: As you can see, it is set to near 60MBs. Finally, and obviously, we check the two values against each other, and fail the build if the EAR is bigger than the size allowed.

    if (ear?.length() > maxsize?.toInteger()) {
      fail("EAR Exceeds maximum size allowed.");
    }

The fail() call in groovy allows you to fail the build with a message attached to it. So now, if anything fishy happens with the EAR, we’ll be able to know as soon as our CI environment attempts to build it. This is a really simple example, but you could see how integrating groovy into maven could allow for some very powerful things to be done.