Use Maven to build OSGi application

Question

I want to build an OSGi compliant multi-moduled application where I have all the required bundles in 3 folders after compilation. I am using maven-bundle-plugin and maven-scr-plugin to create the bundles.

What I want is to run this application in an osgi container (Equinox) with a single command, using a script hopefully. For this I believe I have to create a config.ini file listing all the bundles in the application.

Is there a way to generate this at Maven compilation time itself? Or is there a better way to get all the bundles in some folder structure so that the app can be run straight away?

Vandiver

If this is only for development, you could use Pax Construct (ops4j1.jira.com/wiki/display/paxconstruct/Pax+Construct) which is PaxRunner and some other goodies for Maven. – Crowl

Answer 1

Just have a look at Tycho and its different packaging types (e.g. eclipse-application).

http://www.eclipse.org/tycho/

http://wiki.eclipse.org/Tycho/Packaging_Types

It is used for many commercial and open source applications.

Muster

Answer 2

You can use maven-pax-plugin with PaxRunner in your OSGi Maven project. Check this tutorial for the details.

<plugin>  
 <!-- Pax Runner Maven plugin -->  
 <groupId>org.ops4j</groupId>  
 <artifactId>maven-pax-plugin</artifactId>  
 <version>1.4</version>  
 <configuration>  
       <!-- Pax Runner version -->  
       <runner>1.4.0</runner>  
       <!-- OSGi framework type (equinox, felix, knopflerfish) -->  
       <framework>equinox</framework>  
       <provision>  
             <param>--log=debug</param>  
             <param>--workingDirectory=target/runner</param>  
             <!-- bundles that should be installed -->  
             <param>mvn:org.osgi/org.osgi.compendium/4.1.0@2</param>  
             <param>mvn:org.apache.felix/org.apache.felix.eventadmin/1.2.2@3</param>  
             <param>mvn:org.apache.felix/org.apache.felix.log/1.0.0@3</param>  
       </provision>  
 </configuration>  
</plugin>  

Dryclean

Is it possible to have multiple configurations, i.e. one for felix, and one for equinox? I tried setting the framework via maven property, but felix and equinox have different dependencies (e.g. for declarative services). – Mongolia

Answer 3

I wrote a maven plugin that by default creates a dist folder under target that contains a ready-to-use equinox with all maven dependencies. Equinox is wrapped with YAJSW so you can use the generated equinox package as a test server. Please see the plugin usage page: http://www.everit.org/eosgi-maven-plugin/

The documentation is a bit poor yet so in case you have any question please do not hesitate to ask.

A short step-by-step guide:

• Check out https://github.com/everit-org/osgi-samples-simple (user:guest, pass: guest)
• Run "mvn install". This will generate a testing equinox environment at target/eosgi-itests-dist/equinox in the module tests/core.
• In case you want to have a simple equinox server without the testing modules you can run the command "mvn eosgi:dist" on the tests/core module.

Edit:

A new cookbook will be available soon that contains a much more detailed step-by-step guide. The url is http://cookbook.everit.org

Spalato