concatentate-maven-plugin

Maven plugin that concatenates files. The current implementation is extremely simple and does not allow for much configuration.

Basic Usage

Basic usage is like this:

<plugin>
    <groupId>com.github.mike10004</groupId>
    <artifactId>concatenate-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>0.4</version>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>concatenate-css-files</id>
            <phase>prepare-package</phase> <!-- default phase -->
            <goals>
                <goal>cat</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
                <sources>
                    <fileset>
                        <directory>${project.basedir}/src/main/parts</directory>
                        <orderingStrategy>strict</orderingStrategy>
                        <sort>none</sort> <!-- this is the default -->
                        <includes>
                            <include>head.txt</include>
                            <include>body*.txt</include>
                            <include>tail.txt</include>
                        </includes>
                    </fileset>
                </sources>
                <outputFile>${project.build.outputDirectory}/concatenated-parts.txt</outputFile>
            </configuration>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

This produces a file named target/classes/concatentated-parts.txt that consists of the concatenated content of the files identified in the <includes> section of the sources fileset.

Note that without <orderingStrategy>strict</orderingStrategy>, you wind up with the source files in (what I think is) whatever order the filesystem lists them on a call to java.io.File.list(). Depending on your use case, this may be okay, and you can get a performance benefit out of omitting the ordering strategy parameter.

The other option for <sort> is alphabetical, and it overrides the strict ordering. Alphabetical sorting, if specified, is applied after the includes have been collected, and the files are sorted by the pathname that starts with the <directory>.

Why you might want this

There are a few plugins for concatenating and optimizing resource files, but none are dead simple. Most want to tool around in your classpath or obfuscate and compress the output. If you're always on Linux with Bash and you know the names of your files ahead of time, you can use exec-maven-plugin' and cat` everything to wherever you want it. But if you need build-time file selection and cross-platform compatibility, this plugin might help you.

Running tests

To execute the tests in the projects in the tests folder, the full Maven lifecycle up to the test phase must execute. The plugin is executed during the process-test-resources phase and the output is evaluated in the test phase. (Therefore, running the tests as unit tests in an IDE may fail if the IDE does not execute the preceding build phases.)

Deployment

Run

$ mvn deploy

from the concatenate-maven-plugin child module directory instead of this parent directory.