------
  Including and Excluding Files From the WAR
  ------
  Dennis Lundberg
  ------
  2011-11-21
  ------

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Including and Excluding Files From the WAR


  It is possible to include or exclude certain files from the WAR file, by using
  the <<<\<packagingIncludes\>>>> and <<<\<packagingExcludes\>>>> configuration
  parameters. They each take a comma-separated list of Ant file set patterns.
  You can use wildcards such as <<<**>>> to indicate multiple directories and
  <<<*>>> to indicate an optional part of a file or directory name.
  
  Here is an example where we exclude all JAR files from <<<WEB-INF/lib>>>:

+-----------------+
<project>
  ...
  <build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>${project.version}</version>
        <configuration>
          <packagingExcludes>WEB-INF/lib/*.jar</packagingExcludes>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>
  ...
</project>
+-----------------+

  Sometimes even such wildcards are not enough. In these cases you can use
  regular expressions with the <<<%regex[]>>> syntax. Here is a real life use
  case in which this is used. In this example we want to exclude any
  commons-logging and log4j JARs, but we do not want to exclude the
  log4j-over-slf4j JAR. So we want to exclude <<<log4j-\<version\>.jar>>> but
  keep the <<<log4j-over-slf4j-\<version\>.jar>>>.

+-----------------+
<project>
  ...
  <build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>${project.version}</version>
        <configuration>
          <!--
            Exclude JCL and LOG4J since all logging should go through SLF4J.
            Note that we're excluding log4j-<version>.jar but keeping
            log4j-over-slf4j-<version>.jar
          -->
          <packagingExcludes>
            WEB-INF/lib/commons-logging-*.jar,
            %regex[WEB-INF/lib/log4j-(?!over-slf4j).*.jar]
          </packagingExcludes>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>
  ...
</project>
+-----------------+

  If you have more real life examples of using regular expressions, we'd like to
  know about them. Please file an issue in
  {{{../issue-tracking.html}our issue tracker}} with your configuration, so we
  can expand this page.