We have a complex JavaEE app with multiple wars, jars, ds.xml and config files, etc. In fact, there are over 80 different artifacts that make up our application. We use the maven-assembly-plugin to create a gzip file and untar it into a JBOSS instance to deploy and run. It's not pretty and it's a nightmare to actually do a release. We use Subversion, Maven 3, Nexus for repository management and Jenkins for build management. The following are the manual steps required for us to do a release:
1. Create a SNAPSHOT version of the changed modules and deploy to a test environment a. Create a SNAPSHOT branch in SVN b. Copy changed modules to the new branch from trunk c. Manually change the dependency versions from SNAPSHOT as needed in each individual POM d. Manually change the dependency versions in the assembly POM files (there are 5 sub assemblies and one main assembly to put them all together) e. Run mvn deploy on each new module to install SNAPSHOT versions to Nexus f. Run mvn install on each sub-assembly (I don't want to deploy the assemblies to Nexus) g. Run mvn package on the main assembly h. Copy and untar the main assembly on our QA JBOSS server/instance 2. Create a RELEASE version and deploy to production a. Merge the SNAPSHOT branch modules in SVN to trunk b. Repeat steps a-h, above, manually removing "-SNAPSHOT" from all the POM files I've tried to simplify a little by consolidating dependency management in the parent assembly, but it still requires that I modify each affected sub-assembly to use the correct parent version. Why not use the maven-release-plugin to eliminate the manual process, you might wonder? Great, then I have to modify each POMs scm element whenever I do a SNAPSHOT-to-RELEASE, and, unless I use module inheritance in my POMs at some point, the release plugin isn't going to recurse through all of the changed modules for me. I thought maven was supposed to relieve me of this manual configuration nightmare, but it seems to only have increased it. All of the documentation and Web-help I have seen discusses only simple multi-module systems, with maybe a war, an ejb and a domain jar, for example. That's child's play compared to what we have to deal with, and I'm just out of ideas. Maybe someone out there has faced a similar daunting task and can help. Thanks in advance.
