How do I include third party libraries in openLiberty maven build

I'm currently running a PoC with open Liberty and I'm having a bit of trouble with libraries.

The short of it is our project has a few third party jars that need to be included as libraries, but I can't figure out how to include them when I run mvn install in my Open Liberty project.

I'm trying to configure them in server.xml as follows:

    <library id="MyLib" name="My Libraries">
        <fileset dir="${server.config.dir}/myLib/" includes="*.jar" id="myLib"/>
    </library>

I had hoped they would be picked up by the maven build, but obviously not.

What steps do I need to take to make make sure my library jars are placed in the correct place when running mvn install?

Solution

First of all, I will recommend the easiest approach which is packaging the libraries inside of your application (no server.xml <library> config needed this way). If you are using the maven-war-plugin, then any non-provided dependencies will automatically end up in WEB-INF/lib/ of your application. However, if you have more than 1 application in your Liberty server that need the same libraries, this may not be a good solution.

On to your original question, you can use the maven-dependency-plugin to copy any maven artifact into a particular location during the build. When using this plugin to set up a <library>, be sure to bind the copy step to the prepare-package phase.

Here is an example of adding JUnit to ${server.config.dir}/myLib/ during a Maven build:

<project>
  [...]
  <build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-dependency-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>3.1.1</version>
        <executions>
          <execution>
            <id>copy</id>
            <phase>prepare-package</phase>
            <goals>
              <goal>copy</goal>
            </goals>
          </execution>
        </executions>
        <configuration>
          <artifactItems>
            <artifactItem>
              <groupId>junit</groupId>
              <artifactId>junit</artifactId>
              <version>3.8.1</version>
              <type>jar</type>
              <overWrite>false</overWrite>
              <outputDirectory>${project.build.directory}/liberty/wlp/usr/servers/myServer/myLib</outputDirectory>
              <destFileName>junit.jar</destFileName>
            </artifactItem>
          </artifactItems>
          <overWriteReleases>false</overWriteReleases>
          <overWriteSnapshots>true</overWriteSnapshots>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>
  [...]
</project>