How to: installers, Jetty, postgresql with maven2

I had the following requirements: create an installer for my application;
the application is based on web-technologies, so the installer must ship an application server and automatically install my webapp into it;
the application requires a dbms (Postgres was the choice, a similar process will work also with Hsqldb), so the installer must ship it, possibly automatically installing it on the target machine;
my application is build through maven, so the creation of the installer should be integrated in the whole build chain;
the installer must be easy to use, even for monkey-brained users
I looked for a standardized way to do all this: although Maven team has planned some native support for this kind of problemssee this,at the moment there are only partial solutions from non-mainstreamexternal plugins. I‘ll go through the entire process, and at the end,some more alternatives are proposed.
The solution I ended up involves the following steps: install Postgres installer into a maven repository: this is an easy step, because it only requires to zip the target file (i did it manually, but if you really you can let maven do it for you...which I don‘t suggest at all), and install and deploy it into your local repository. So I downloaded the file fromthe msi postgres windows and issued this: mvn -Dfile=postgres-installer.zip \n
-DgeneratePom=true \n
-DgroupId=postgres \n
-DartifactId=postgres-installer \n
-Dversion=VERSION-NUMBER -DrepositoryId=SERVER \n
-Durl=scp://path/to/your/maven2/repository \n
-Dpackaging=zip \n
deploy:deploy-file
install an application server into a maven repository: do the same for your application server of choice: mine was jetty, because I use it heavily during development, and because its installint procedure is a matter of unzipping and copying its files somewhere (which other application servers allow this ?): mvn -Dfile=jetty-6.0.2.zip \n
-DgeneratePom=true \n
-DgroupId=jetty \n
-DartifactId=jetty \n
-Dversion=VERSION-NUMBER -DrepositoryId=SERVER \n
-Durl=scp://path/to/your/maven2/repository \n
-Dpackaging=zip \n
deploy:deploy-file
install the application war into a maven repository: this is maybe the easiest step: given your webapp, which should have a packaging element of value war, it is only a matter of doing a mvn deploy from the root of your project, given that you‘ve provided the correct distribution management informations in the pom; i won‘t comment further on this;
install locally the izpack-maven-plugin: this mojo is still a proposal, so you can‘t simply declare it in your pom: you need to install by your self. Let‘s get it fromJira and from the root directory: mvn install
use the maven-dependency-plugin properly:this is the interesting part. It requires just a little bit of knowledge of the goals available through this plugin and to combine them propertly. here is the result:

org.codehaus.mojo
dependency-maven-plugin



unzip-jetty-postgresql
process-resources

unpack




jetty
jetty-standalone
6.0.2
zip

${project.build.directory}/${project.build.finalName}/



postgresql
postgresql-installer-win
8.1.5
zip

${project.build.directory}/${project.build.finalName}/postgresql/






copy-webapp-war
process-resources

copy


true


your-groupid
your-webapp
1.0-SNAPSHOT
war

${project.build.directory}/${project.build.finalName}/jetty-6.0.2/webapps/








configure the izpack plugin to run in the package phase: this is very easy, and goes like this:
org.codehaus.mojo
izpack-maven-plugin
1.0-SNAPSHOT


package

izpack




Having this pom configuration, it is enough to issue mvn package to find in our target/directory a beautiful executable jar file, which will install ourapplication, togheter with postgres and application in the targetmachine.
Ah, sure: you need a working izpack.xml file in src/izpack/directory to let the maven plugin works correctly. In a future blogentry, I‘ll go on with this example showing how to write such file.
One more thing: very recently, Vincent Massol proposed a new support(the Packager API) within the core api of cargo plugin, which shouldgreetly simplify this process. Stay tuned!