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Part 4.1: Building and packaging your plugin

This tutorial covers how to use Maven to build and package your plugin for use with Funnelback.

Prerequisites

Before using this guide ensure that you have written and tested your plugin as covered in Part 3. Writing your plugin of the developing your first plugin guide.

Building the plugin

  1. Open up a terminal window and change to the folder at the root of the title-prefix-plugin project (the folder containing pom.xml)

  2. Run the following Maven command:

    $ mvn clean package

    This builds, runs the tests and assembles the plugin into a subfolder:

    target/<version>

    where version is what was defined when creating the plugin from the Maven archetype.

Plugin layout

Examine the structure of the built plugin. From the terminal:

Change to the target/<version> folder and examine the file structure. title-prefix-plugin/target/1.0.0:

1.0.0
 |- libs
    |- title-prefix-plugin-1.0.0.jar

This is a very simple plugin that contains only a single jar file in the libs folder. More complicated plugins that depended on third party libraries might include jar file for other dependencies.

Packaging into an archive

Funnelback expects the installed plugin to follow a specific folder structure, based on the name and version of the plugin. The title-prefix-plugin should have the following structure:

$SEARCH_HOME/share/plugins
  |- title-prefix-plugin (our plugin)
      |- 1.0.0
          |- libs
              |- title-prefix-plugin-1.0.0.jar

This mirrors the structure of the plugin built above. In order to make distribution easier package this into a single .tar.gz file using the following commands:

$ cd target
$ mkdir title-prefix-plugin
$ cp -R 1.0.0 title-prefix-plugin
$ tar -czvf title-prefix-plugin-1.0.0.tar.gz title-prefix-plugin

This will produce:

title-prefix-plugin-1.0.0.tar.gz

Next steps

The next tutorial demonstrates installation of the plugin onto a Funnelback server.

See also