War external dependency overlay - move jars from WEB-INF/lib-new to WEB-INF/lib

Question

I am working on a maven project with a war external dependency (let's call this war dependency WAR-DEP)

After the build and during the package phase I am taking the content of WAR-DEP and merging it with the content of the current build using the overlay feature of the maven-war plugin.

In WAR-DEP we have some required jars in it's WEB-INF/lib folder so with the overlay we end up getting everything we need in our final war but our problem started when the project providing us with the WAR-DEP war added a new folder in the WEB-INF/lib-new and moved some of the jars we had before in the WEB-INF/lib folder to this new folder WEB-INF/lib-new.

After building with this new version of the WAR-DEP the overlay worked as expected so we ended up having two folders in the WEB-INF (lib and lib-new) and our application stopped working since this WEB-INF/lib-new is not recognized by tomcat server. So without changing the classpath on tomcat side is there a way I can move the content of lib-new into the lib folder before generating the war ? I mean for example during the overlay but I am not sure how to do this. Thanks for your inputs.

Answer 1

maven-war-plugin does not have required functionality, however maven-dependency-plugin may help, smth. like:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-dependency-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>3.3.0</version>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>unpack-lib-new</id>
            <goals>
                <goal>unpack</goal>
            </goals>
            <phase>prepare-package</phase>
            <configuration>
                <artifactItems>
                    <artifactItem>
                        <groupId>dep-group-id</groupId>
                        <artifactId>dep-artifiact-id</artifactId>
                        <version>dep-version</version>
                        <type>war</type>
                        <outputDirectory>${project.build.directory}/${build.finalName}/WEB-INF/lib</outputDirectory>
                        <includes>WEB-INF/lib-new/*</includes>
                        <fileMappers>
                            <org.codehaus.plexus.components.io.filemappers.FlattenFileMapper/>
                        </fileMappers>
                    </artifactItem>
                </artifactItems>
            </configuration>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>
<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>3.3.2</version>
    <configuration>
        ...
        <overlays>
            <!-- current project -->
            <overlay/>
            <overlay>
                <id>dep-skip-lib-new</id>
                <groupId>dep-group-id</groupId>
                <artifactId>dep-artifact-id</artifactId>
                <excludes>
                    <exclude>WEB-INF/lib-new/*</exclude>
                </excludes>
            </overlay>
        </overlays>
        ...
    </configuration>
</plugin>