WildFly Maven Plugin

By James R. Perkins | March 09, 2023

The wildfly-maven-plugin has introduced a new dev goal. If you are familiar with the run goal, this goal is very similar. However, it watches for changes to source files. If changes are found, the WAR is rebuilt and redeployed. This new goal is available in version 4.1.0.Beta3 of the wildfly-maven-plugin.

Using the dev Goal

In its simplest form you enable the plugin like any other maven plugin:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.wildfly.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>wildfly-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>${version.wildfly-maven-plugin}</version>
</plugin>

Once added to your POM you can simply execute mvn wildfly:dev on your project, and you should be up and running. With no configuration, a full server is provisioned in your projects build directory, e.g. target. Changes to source files are monitored. If required, the compile:compile goal will be invoked. If a resource needs to be copied, the resources:resources goal will be invoked. In some cases the deployment might also need to be redeployed.

You can also configure the goal to provision a custom version of WildFly. Below is an example of configuring a cloud server with the cloud-server layer with an H2 database.

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.wildfly.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>wildfly-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>${version.wildfly-maven-plugin}</version>
    <configuration>
        <feature-packs>
            <feature-pack>
                <location>org.wildfly:wildfly-galleon-pack:${version.server}</location>
            </feature-pack>
            <feature-pack>
                <location>org.wildfly.cloud:wildfly-cloud-galleon-pack:${version.cloud.fp}</location>
            </feature-pack>
        </feature-packs>
        <layers>
            <layer>cloud-server</layer>
            <layer>h2-driver</layer>
        </layers>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

Full documentation for the goal can be found in the wildfly-maven-plugin documentation.

Limitations

There are currently a couple limitations on this goal. The first is this goal will only work with WAR deployments. The other is changes to the POM file are not watched. If you change the POM you need to kill, CTRL+C, the job and restart the process.

Conclusion

Hopefully this goal is useful for more rapid development. If you’d like to see new features or have questions on how this new goal works, open a discussion on GitHub or in the forum. If you find a bug feel free to report it in JIRA.

WildFly is fully open. All components are open source and follow a community-focused development process.

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