I am pulling JavaScript from a jar as part of my build process. I wish this js to be part of my web resources for the app deployed on tomcat and I have updated my build process to allow this to happen. Doing a maven build (outside eclipse) works as expected and I can package up a war with everything in its proper order.
However, when building with eclipse I have run into some headaches. My understanding was in order to have web resources deployed to tomcat through an incremental build, I needed to put these build-time generated js files into the target/m2e-wtp/web-resources directory. However, when I publish these new files are ignored and the web-resources deployed to tomcat seem to be pulled from my source.
I also adjusted my project's deployment assembly settings. Through this I still don't have it working. I have the entry [source:/target/m2e-wtp/web-resources, DeployPath:/] which should find the newly generated files when I perform a "publish" to the server. However, the same thing happens where m2e-wtp seems to be pulling from source.
Am I missing something? How can I get standard behavior from m2e-wtp (i.e. make it comparable to a build done outside of eclipse)? Or can I have eclipse just build the war and deploy it as such (not do the incremental builds, I can sacrifice some speed)?
FYI (versions):
eclipse: (Using Spring Tool Suite) 3.2.0
m2e: 1.3.1
m2e-wtp: 0.17.0
tomcat: 7.0
Experiment added later:
After deleting my target dir, I performed a publish to Tomcat and all the web-resources were copied from my source. I also got a popup about files not found, most of which are compiled classes. However, it was looking for three files in the /target/m2e-wtp/web-resources/META-INF. Does the m2e-wtp plugin only look for specific files in a folder rather than the entire specified folder?
The problem is that the target directory was not being refreshed. Eclipse (or m2e plugin for that matter) doesn't recognize or care that files change in the target directory during a build, something that I was assuming. For now I have the auto-refresh (for the workspace) option on. The refresh on access option didn't working as it seemed to trigger the refresh only when I was publishing to tomcat for the first time.