Maven Assemblies

Maven provides plugins that are used to create the most common archive types, most of which are consumable as dependencies of other projects. Some examples include the JAR, WAR, EJB, and EAR plugins. As discussed in Chapter 4, The Build Lifecycle these plugins correspond to different project packaging types each with a slightly different build process. While Maven has plugins and customized lifecycles to support standard packaging types, there are times when you’ll need to create an archive or directory with a custom layout. Such custom archives are called Maven Assemblies.

There are any number of reasons why you may want to build custom archives for your project. Perhaps the most common is the project distribution. The word ‘distribution’ means many different things to different people (and projects), depending on how the project is meant to be used. Essentially, these are archives that provide a convenient way for users to install or otherwise make use of the project’s releases. In some cases, this may mean bundling a web application with an application server like Jetty. In others, it could mean bundling API documentation alongside source and compiled binaries like jar files. Assemblies usually come in handy when you are building the final distribution of a product. For example, products like Nexus introduced in Repository Management with Nexus, are the product of large multi-module Maven products, and the final archive you download from Sonatype was created using a Maven Assembly.

In most cases, the Assembly plugin is ideally suited to the process of building project distributions. However, assemblies don’t have to be distribution archives; assemblies are intended to provide Maven users with the flexibility they need to produce customized archives of all kinds. Essentially, assemblies are intended to fill the gaps between the standard archive formats provided by project package types. Of course, you could write an entire Maven plugin simply to generate your own custom archive format, along with a new lifecycle mapping and artifact-handling configuration to tell Maven how to deploy it. But the Assembly plugin makes this unnecessary in most cases by providing generalized support for creating your own archive recipe without spending so much time writing Maven code.

While many people opt to create their own archive recipes - called assembly descriptors - this isn’t strictly necessary. The Assembly plugin provides built-in descriptors for several common archive types that you can use immediately without writing a line of configuration. The following assembly descriptors are predefined in the Maven Assembly plugin:

bin

The bin descriptor is used to bundle project LICENSE, README, and NOTICE files with the project’s main artifact, assuming this project builds a jar as its main artifact. Think of this as the smallest possible binary distribution for completely self-contained projects.

jar-with-dependencies

The jar-with-dependencies descriptor builds a JAR archive with the contents of the main project jar along with the unpacked contents of all the project’s runtime dependencies. Coupled with an appropriate Main-Class Manifest entry (discussed in “Plugin Configuration” below), this descriptor can produce a self-contained, executable jar for your project, even if the project has dependencies.

project

The project descriptor simply archives the project directory structure as it exists in your file-system and, most likely, in your version control system. Of course, the target directory is omitted, as are any version-control metadata files like the CVS and .svn directories we’re all used to seeing. Basically, the point of this descriptor is to create a project archive that, when unpacked, can be built using Maven.

src

The src descriptor produces an archive of your project source and pom.xml files, along with any LICENSE, README, and NOTICE files that are in the project’s root directory. This precursor to the project descriptor produces an archive that can be built by Maven in most cases. However, because of its assumption that all source files and resources reside in the standard src directory, it has the potential to leave out non-standard directories and files that are nonetheless critical to some builds.

The Assembly plugin can be executed in two ways: you can invoke it directly from the command line, or you can configure it as part of your standard build process by binding it to a phase of your project’s build lifecycle. Direct invocation has its uses, particularly for one-off assemblies that are not considered part of your project’s core deliverables. In most cases, you’ll probably want to generate the assemblies for your project as part of its standard build process. Doing this has the effect of including your custom assemblies whenever the project is installed or deployed into Maven’s repositories, so they are always available to your users.

As an example of the direct invocation of the Assembly plugin, imagine that you wanted to ship off a copy of your project which people could build from source. Instead of just deploying the end-product of the build, you wanted to include the source as well. You won’t need to do this often, so it doesn’t make sense to add the configuration to your POM. Instead, you can use the following command:

$ mvn -DdescriptorId=project assembly:single
...
[INFO] [assembly:single]
[INFO] Building tar : /Users/~/mvn-examples-1.0/assemblies/direct-invocation/\
target/direct-invocation-1.0-SNAPSHOT-project.tar.gz
[INFO] Building tar : /Users/~/mvn-examples-1.0/assemblies/direct-invocation/\
target/direct-invocation-1.0-SNAPSHOT-project.tar.bz2
[INFO] Building zip: /Users/~/mvn-examples-1.0/assemblies/direct-invocation/\
target/direct-invocation-1.0-SNAPSHOT-project.zip
...

Imagine you want to produce an executable JAR from your project. If your project is totally self-contained with no dependencies, this can be achieved with the main project artifact using the archive configuration of the JAR plugin. However, most projects have dependencies, and those dependencies must be incorporated in any executable JAR. In this case, you want to make sure that every time the main project JAR is installed or deployed, your executable JAR goes along with it.

Assuming the main class for the project is org.sonatype.mavenbook.App, the following POM configuration will create an executable JAR:

Assembly Descriptor for Executable JAR. 

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
         xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
         xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0
                             http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd">

    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
    <groupId>org.sonatype.mavenbook.assemblies</groupId>
    <artifactId>executable-jar</artifactId>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
    <packaging>jar</packaging>
    <name>Assemblies Executable Jar Example</name>
    <url>http://sonatype.com/book</url>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>commons-lang</groupId>
            <artifactId>commons-lang</artifactId>
            <version>2.4</version>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
    <build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <artifactId>maven-assembly-plugin</artifactId>
                <version>2.2-beta-2</version>
                <executions>
                    <execution>
                        <id>create-executable-jar</id>
                        <phase>package</phase>
                        <goals>
                            <goal>single</goal>
                        </goals>
                        <configuration>
                            <descriptorRefs>
                                <descriptorRef>
                                    jar-with-dependencies
                                </descriptorRef>
                            </descriptorRefs>
                            <archive>
                                <manifest>
                                    <mainClass>org.sonatype.mavenbook.App</mainClass>
                                </manifest>
                            </archive>
                        </configuration>
                    </execution>
                </executions>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>
</project>

There are two things to notice about the configuration above. First, we’re using the descriptorRefs configuration section instead of the descriptorId parameter we used last time. This allows multiple assembly types to be built from the same Assembly plugin execution, while still supporting our use case with relatively little extra configuration. Second, the archive element under configuration sets the Main-Class manifest attribute in the generated JAR. This section is commonly available in plugins that create JAR files, such as the JAR plugin used for the default project package type.

Now, you can produce the executable JAR simply by executing mvn package. Afterward, we’ll also get a directory listing for the target directory, just to verify that the executable JAR was generated. Finally, just to prove that we actually do have an executable JAR, we’ll try executing it:

$ mvn package
... (output omitted) ...
[INFO] [jar:jar]
[INFO] Building jar: ~/mvn-examples-1.0/assemblies/executable-jar/target/\
executable-jar-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar
[INFO] [assembly:single {execution: create-executable-jar}]
[INFO] Processing DependencySet (output=)
[INFO] Building jar: ~/mvn-examples-1.0/assemblies/executable-jar/target/\
executable-jar-1.0-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar
... (output omitted) ...
$ ls -1 target
... (output omitted) ...
executable-jar-1.0-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar
executable-jar-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar
... (output omitted) ...
$ java -jar \
target/executable-jar-1.0-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar
Hello, World!

From the output shown above, you can see that the normal project build now produces a new artifact in addition to the main JAR file. The new one has a classifier of jar-with-dependencies. Finally, we verified that the new JAR actually is executable, and that executing the JAR produced the desired output of “Hello, World!”

When you generate assemblies as part of your normal build process, those assembly archives will be attached to your main project’s artifact. This means they will be installed and deployed alongside the main artifact, and are then resolvable in much the same way. Each assembly artifact is given the same basic coordinates (groupId, artifactId, and version) as the main project. However, these artifacts are attachments, which in Maven means they are derivative works based on some aspect of the main project build. To provide a couple of examples, source assemblies contain the raw inputs for the project build, and jar-with-dependencies assemblies contain the project’s classes plus its dependencies. Attached artifacts are allowed to circumvent the Maven requirement of one project, one artifact precisely because of this derivative quality.

Since assemblies are (normally) attached artifacts, each must have a classifier to distinguish it from the main artifact, in addition to the normal artifact coordinates. By default, the classifier is the same as the assembly descriptor’s identifier. When using the built-in assembly descriptors, as above, the assembly descriptor’s identifier is generally also the same as the identifier used in the descriptorRef for that type of assembly.

Once you’ve deployed an assembly alongside your main project artifact, how can you use that assembly as a dependency in another project? The answer is fairly straightforward. Projects depend on other projects using a combination of four basic elements, referred to as a project’s coordinates: groupId, artifactId, version, and packaging. In Section 5.5.3, “Platform Classifiers”, multiple platform-specific variants of a project’s artifact are available, and the project specifies a classifier element with a value of either win or linux to select the appropriate dependency artifact for the target platform. Assembly artifacts can be used as dependencies using the required coordinates of a project plus the classifier under which the assembly was installed or deployed. If the assembly is not a JAR archive, we also need to declare its type.

Configuring the project assembly in top-level POM. 

<project>
    ...
    <build>
        <pluginManagement>
            <plugins>
                <plugin>
                    <artifactId>maven-assembly-plugin</artifactId>
                    <version>2.2-beta-2</version>
                    <executions>
                        <execution>
                            <id>create-project-bundle</id>
                            <phase>package</phase>
                            <goals>
                                <goal>single</goal>
                            </goals>
                            <configuration>
                                <descriptorRefs>
                                    <descriptorRef>project</descriptorRef>
                                </descriptorRefs>
                            </configuration>
                        </execution>
                    </executions>
                </plugin>
            </plugins>
        </pluginManagement>
    </build>
    ...
</project>

Each project POM references the managed plugin configuration from Configuring the project assembly in top-level POM using a minimal plugin declaration in its build section shown in Activating the Assembly Plugin Configuration in Child Projects.

Activating the Assembly Plugin Configuration in Child Projects. 

<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <artifactId>maven-assembly-plugin</artifactId>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>

To produce the set of project assemblies, run mvn install from the top-level directory. You should see Maven installing artifacts with classifiers in your local repository.

$ mvn install
...
Installing ~/mvn-examples-1.0/assemblies/as-dependencies/project-parent/\
second-project/target/second-project-1.0-SNAPSHOT-project.tar.gz to
~/.m2/repository/org/sonatype/mavenbook/assemblies/second-project/1.0-SNAPSHOT/\
second-project-1.0-SNAPSHOT-project.tar.gz
...
Installing ~/mvn-examples-1.0/assemblies/as-dependencies/project-parent/\
second-project/target/second-project-1.0-SNAPSHOT-project.tar.bz2 to
~/.m2/repository/org/sonatype/mavenbook/assemblies/second-project/1.0-SNAPSHOT/\
second-project-1.0-SNAPSHOT-project.tar.bz2
...
Installing ~/mvn-examples-1.0/assemblies/as-dependencies/project-parent/\
second-project/target/second-project-1.0-SNAPSHOT-project.zip to
~/.m2/repository/org/sonatype/mavenbook/assemblies/second-project/1.0-SNAPSHOT/\\
second-project-1.0-SNAPSHOT-project.zip
...

When you run install, Maven will copy each project’s main artifact and each assembly to your local Maven repository. All of these artifacts are now available for reference as dependencies in other projects locally. If your ultimate goal is to create a bundle which includes assemblies from multiple projects, you can do so by creating another project which will include other project’s assemblies as dependencies. This bundling project (aptly named project-bundle) is responsible for creating the bundled assembly. The POM for the bundling project would resemble the XML document listed in POM for the Assembly Bundling Project.

POM for the Assembly Bundling Project. 

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
         xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
         xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0
                             http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd">
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
    <groupId>org.sonatype.mavenbook.assemblies</groupId>
    <artifactId>project-bundle</artifactId>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
    <packaging>pom</packaging>
    <name>Assemblies-as-Dependencies Example Project Bundle</name>
    <url>http://sonatype.com/book</url>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.sonatype.mavenbook.assemblies</groupId>
            <artifactId>first-project</artifactId>
            <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
            <classifier>project</classifier>
            <type>zip</type>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.sonatype.mavenbook.assemblies</groupId>
            <artifactId>second-project</artifactId>
            <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
            <classifier>project</classifier>
            <type>zip</type>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
    <build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <artifactId>maven-assembly-plugin</artifactId>
                <version>2.2-beta-2</version>
                <executions>
                    <execution>
                        <id>bundle-project-sources</id>
                        <phase>package</phase>
                        <goals>
                            <goal>single</goal>
                        </goals>
                        <configuration>
                            <descriptorRefs>
                                <descriptorRef>
                                    jar-with-dependencies
                                </descriptorRef>
                            </descriptorRefs>
                        </configuration>
                    </execution>
                </executions>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>
</project>

This bundling project’s POM references the two assemblies from first-project and second-project. Instead of referencing the main artifact of each project, the bundling project’s POM specifies a classifier of project and a type of zip. This tells Maven to resolve the ZIP archive which was created by the project assembly. Note that the bundling project generates a jar-with-dependencies assembly. jar-with-dependencies does not create a particularly elegant bundle, it simply creates a JAR file with the unpacked contents of all of the dependencies. jar-with-dependencies is really just telling Maven to take all of the dependencies, unpack them, and then create a single archive which includes the output of the current project. In this project, it has the effect of creating a single JAR file that puts the two project assemblies from first-project and second-project side-by-side.

This example illustrates how the basic capabilities of the Maven Assembly plugin can be combined without the need for a custom assembly descriptor. It achieves the purpose of creating a single archive that contains the project directories for multiple projects side-by-side. This time, the jar-with-dependencies is just a storage format, so we don’t need to specify a Main-Class manifest attribute. To build the bundle, we just build the project-bundle project normally:

$ mvn package
...
[INFO] [assembly:single {execution: bundle-project-sources}]
[INFO] Processing DependencySet (output=)
[INFO] Building jar: ~/downloads/mvn-examples-1.0/assemblies/as-dependencies/\
project-bundle/target/project-bundle-1.0-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar

$ jar tf \
target/project-bundle-1.0-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar
...
first-project-1.0-SNAPSHOT/pom.xml
first-project-1.0-SNAPSHOT/src/main/java/org/sonatype/mavenbook/App.java
first-project-1.0-SNAPSHOT/src/test/java/org/sonatype/mavenbook/AppTest.java
...
second-project-1.0-SNAPSHOT/pom.xml
second-project-1.0-SNAPSHOT/src/main/java/org/sonatype/mavenbook/App.java
second-project-1.0-SNAPSHOT/src/test/java/org/sonatype/mavenbook/AppTest.java

After reading this section, the title should make more sense. You’ve assembled assemblies from two projects into an assembly using a bundling project which has a dependency on each of the assemblies.

When the standard assembly descriptors introduced in Section 8.2, “Assembly Basics” are not adequate, you will need to define your own assembly descriptor. The assembly descriptor is an XML document which defines the structure and contents of an assembly. The assembly descriptor contains five main configuration sections, plus two additional sections: one for specifying standard assembly-descriptor fragments, called component descriptors, and another for specifying custom file processor classes to help manage the assembly-production process.

Base Configuration

This section contains the information required by all assemblies, plus some additional configuration options related to the format of the entire archive, such as the base path to use for all archive entries. For the assembly descriptor to be valid, you must at least specify the assembly id, at least one format, and at least one of the other sections shown above.

File Information

The configurations in this segment of the assembly descriptor apply to specific files on the file system within the project’s directory structure. This segment contains two main sections: files and fileSets. You use files and fileSets to control the permissions of files in an assembly and to include or exclude files from an assembly.

Dependency Information

Almost all projects of any size depend on other projects. When creating distribution archives, project dependencies are usually included in the end-product of an assembly. This section manages the way dependencies are included in the resulting archive. This section allows you to specify whether dependencies are unpacked, added directly to the lib/ directory, or mapped to new file names. This section also allows you to control the permissions of dependencies in the assembly, and which dependencies are included in an assembly.

Repository Information

At times, it’s useful to isolate the sum total of all artifacts necessary to build a project, whether they’re dependency artifacts, POMs of dependency artifacts, or even a project’s own POM ancestry (your parent POM, its parent, and so on). This section allows you to include one or more artifact-repository directory structures inside your assembly, with various configuration options. The Assembly plugin does not have the ability to include plugin artifacts in these repositories yet.

Module Information

This section of the assembly descriptor allows you to take advantage of these parent-child relationships when assembling your custom archive, to include source files, artifacts, and dependencies from your project’s modules. This is the most complex section of the assembly descriptor, because it allows you to work with modules and sub-modules in two ways: as a series of fileSets (via the sources section) or as a series of dependencySets (via the binaries section).

Any property discussed in Section 9.2, “Maven Properties” can be referenced in an assembly descriptor. Before any assembly descriptor is used by Maven, it is interpolated using information from the POM and the current build environment. All properties supported for interpolation within the POM itself are valid for use in assembly descriptors, including POM properties, POM element values, system properties, user-defined properties, and operating-system environment variables.

The only exceptions to this interpolation step are elements in various sections of the descriptor named outputDirectory, outputDirectoryMapping, or outputFileNameMapping. The reason these are held back in their raw form is to allow artifact- or module-specific information to be applied when resolving expressions in these values, on a per-item basis. 

There are two essential pieces of information that are required for every assembly: the id, and the list of archive formats to produce. In practice, at least one other section of the descriptor is required - since most archive format components will choke if they don’t have at least one file to include - but without at least one format and an id, there is no archive to create. The id is used both in the archive’s file name, and as part of the archive’s artifact classifier in the Maven repository. The format string also controls the archiver-component instance that will create the final assembly archive. All assembly descriptors must contain an id and at least one format:

Required Assembly Descriptor Elements. 

<assembly>
    <id>bundle</id>
    <formats>
        <format>zip</format>
    </formats>
    ...
</assembly>

The assembly id can be any string that does not contain spaces. The standard practice is to use dashes when you must separate words within the assembly id. If you were creating an assembly to create an interesting unique package structure, you would give your an id of something like interesting-unique-package. It also supports multiple formats within a single assembly descriptor, allowing you to create the familiar .zip, .tar.gz, and .tar.bz2 distribution archive set with ease. If you don’t find the archive format you need, you can also create a custom format. Custom formats are discussed in Section 8.5.8, “componentDescriptors and”. The Assembly plugin supports several archive formats natively, including:

The id and format are essential because they will become a part of the coordinates for the assembled archive. The example from Required Assembly Descriptor Elements will create an assembly artifact of type zip with a classifier of bundle.

The files section is the simplest part of the assembly descriptor, it is designed for files that have a definite location relative to your project’s directory. Using this section, you have absolute control over the exact set of files that are included in your assembly, exactly what they are named, and where they will reside in the archive.

Including a JAR file in an Assembly using files. 

<assembly>
    ...
    <files>
        <file>
            <source>target/my-app-1.0.jar</source>
            <outputDirectory>lib</outputDirectory>
            <destName>my-app.jar</destName>
            <fileMode>0644</fileMode>
        </file>
    </files>
    ...
</assembly>

Assuming you were building a project called my-app with a version of 1.0, Including a JAR file in an Assembly using files would include your project’s JAR in the assembly’s lib/ directory, trimming the version from the file name in the process so the final file name is simply my-app.jar. It would then make the JAR readable by everyone and writable by the user that owns it (this is what the mode 0644 means for files, using Unix four-digit Octal permission notation). For more information about the format of the value in fileMode, please see the Wikipedia’s explanation of four-digit Octal notation.

You could build a very complex assembly using file entries, if you knew the full list of files to be included. Even if you didn’t know the full list before the build started, you could probably use a custom Maven plugin to discover that list and generate the assembly descriptor using references like the one above. While the files section gives you fine-grained control over the permission, location, and name of each file in the assembly archive, listing a file element for every file in a large archive would be a tedious exercise. For the most part, you will be operating on groups of files and dependencies using fileSets. The remaining four file-inclusion sections are designed to help you include entire sets of files that match a particular criteria.

Similar to the files section, fileSets are intended for files that have a definite location relative to your project’s directory structure. However, unlike the files section, fileSets describe sets of files, defined by file and path patterns they match (or don’t match), and the general directory structure in which they are located. The simplest fileSet just specifies the directory where the files are located:

<assembly>
    ...
    <fileSets>
        <fileSet>
            <directory>src/main/java</directory>
        </fileSet>
    </fileSets>
    ...
</assembly>

This file set simply includes the contents of the src/main/java directory from our project. It takes advantage of many default settings in the section, so let’s discuss those briefly.

First, you’ll notice that we haven’t told the file set where within the assembly matching files should be located. By default, the destination directory (specified with outputDirectory) is the same as the source directory (in our case, src/main/java). Additionally, we haven’t specified any inclusion or exclusion file patterns. When these are empty, the file set assumes that all files within the source directory are included, with some important exceptions. The exceptions to this rule pertain mainly to source-control metadata files and directories, and are controlled by the useDefaultExcludes flag, which is defaulted to true. When active, useDefaultExcludes will keep directories like .svn/ and CVS/ from being added to the assembly archive. Section 8.5.3, “Default Exclusion Patterns for” provides a detailed list of the default exclusion patterns.

If we want more control over this file set, we can specify it more explicitly. Including Files with fileSet shows a fileSet element with all of the default elements specified.

Including Files with fileSet. 

<assembly>
    ...
    <fileSets>
        <fileSet>
            <directory>src/main/java</directory>
            <outputDirectory>src/main/java</outputDirectory>
            <includes>
                <include>**</include>
            </includes>
            <useDefaultExcludes>true</useDefaultExcludes>
            <fileMode>0644</fileMode>
            <directoryMode>0755</directoryMode>
        </fileSet>
    </fileSets>
    ...
</assembly>

The includes section uses a list of include elements, which contain path patterns. These patterns may contain wildcards such as ‘*’ which matches one or more directories or ‘’ which matches part of a file name, and ‘?’ which matches a single character in a file name. Including Files with fileSet uses a fileMode entry to specify that files in this set should be readable by all, but only writable by the owner. Since the fileSet includes directories, we also have the option of specifying a directoryMode that works in much the same way as the fileMode. Since a directories’ execute permission is what allows users to list their contents, we want to make sure directories are executable in addition to being readable. Like files, only the owner can write to directories in this set.

The fileSet entry offers some other options as well. First, it allows for an excludes section with a form identical to the includes section. These exclusion patterns allow you to exclude specific file patterns from a fileSet. Exclude patterns take precedence over include patterns. Additionally, you can set the filtering flag to true if you want to substitute property values for expressions within the included files. Expressions can be delimited either by ${ and } (standard Maven expressions like ${project.groupId}) or by @ and @ (standard Ant expressions like @project.groupId@). You can adjust the line ending of your files using the lineEnding element; valid values for lineEnding are:

keep

Preserve line endings from original files. (This is the default value.)

unix

Unix-style line endings

lf

Only a Line Feed Character

dos

MS-DOS-style line endings

crlf

Carriage-return followed by a Line Feed

Finally, if you want to ensure that all file-matching patterns are used, you can use the useStrictFiltering element with a value of true (the default is false). This can be especially useful if unused patterns may signal missing files in an intermediary output directory. When useStrictFiltering is set to true, the Assembly plugin will fail if an include pattern is not satisfied. In other words, if you have an include pattern which includes a file from a build, and that file is not present, setting useStrictFiltering to true will cause a failure if Maven cannot find the file to be included.

When you use the default exclusion patterns, the Maven Assembly plugin is going to be ignoring more than just SVN and CVS information. By default the exclusion patterns are defined by the DirectoryScannerclass in the plexus-utils project hosted at Codehaus. The array of exclude patterns is defined as a static, final String array named DEFAULTEXCLUDES in DirectoryScanner. The contents of this variable are shown in Definition of Default Exclusion Patterns from Plexus Utils.

Definition of Default Exclusion Patterns from Plexus Utils. 

public static final String[] DEFAULTEXCLUDES = {
// Miscellaneous typical temporary files
"**/*~",
"**/#*#",
"**/.#*",
"**/%*%",
"**/._*",

// CVS
"**/CVS",
"**/CVS/**",
"**/.cvsignore",

// SCCS
"**/SCCS",
"**/SCCS/**",

// Visual SourceSafe
"**/vssver.scc",

// Subversion
"**/.svn",
"**/.svn/**",

// Arch
"**/.arch-ids",
"**/.arch-ids/**",

//Bazaar
"**/.bzr",
"**/.bzr/**",

//SurroundSCM
"**/.MySCMServerInfo",

// Mac
"**/.DS_Store"
};

This default array of patterns excludes temporary files from editors like GNU Emacs, and other common temporary files from Macs and a few common source control systems (although Visual SourceSafe is more of a curse than a source control system). If you need to override these default exclusion patterns you set useDefaultExcludes to false and then define a set of exclusion patterns in your own assembly descriptor.

One of the most common requirements for assemblies is the inclusion of a project’s dependencies in an assembly archive. Where files and fileSets deal with files in your project, dependency files don’t have a location in your project. The artifacts your project depends on have to be resolved by Maven during the build. Dependency artifacts are abstract, they lack a definite location, and are resolved using a symbolic set of Maven coordinates. Since file and fileSet specifications require a concrete source path, dependencies are included or excluded from an assembly using a combination of Maven coordinates and dependency scopes.

The simplest dependencySet is an empty element:

<assembly>
    ...
    <dependencySets>
        <dependencySet/>
    </dependencySets>
    ...
</assembly>

The dependencySet above will match all runtime dependencies of your project (runtime scope includes the compile scope implicitly), and it will add these dependencies to the root directory of your assembly archive. It will also copy the current project’s main artifact into the root of the assembly archive, if it exists.

While the default dependency set can be quite useful with no configuration whatsoever, this section of the assembly descriptor also supports a wide array of configuration options, allowing your to tailor its behavior to your specific requirements. For example, the first thing you might do to the dependency set above is exclude the current project artifact, by setting the useProjectArtifact flag to false (again, its default value is true for legacy reasons). This will allow you to manage the current project’s build output separately from its dependency files. Alternatively, you might choose to unpack the dependency artifacts using by setting the unpack flag to true (this is false by default). When unpack is set to true, the Assembly plugin will combine the unpacked contents of all matching dependencies inside the archive’s root directory.

From this point, there are several things you might choose to do with this dependency set. The next sections discuss how to define the output location for dependency sets and how include and exclude dependencies by scope. Finally, we’ll expand on the unpacking functionality of the dependency set by exploring some advanced options for unpacking dependencies.

<assembly>
    ...
    <dependencySets>
        <dependencySet>
            <outputDirectory>${artifact.groupId}</outputDirectory>
        </dependencySet>
    </dependencySets>
    ...
</assembly>

<assembly>
    ...
    <dependencySets>
        <dependencySet>
            <outputDirectory>${artifact.groupId}</outputDirectory>
            <outputFileNameMapping>
                ${artifact.artifactId}.${artifact.extension}
            </outputFileNameMapping>
        </dependencySet>
    </dependencySets>
    ...
</assembly>

<archive-root-dir>/<outputDirectory>/<outputFileNameMapping>

<assembly>
    ...
    <dependencySets>
        <dependencySet>
            <scope>provided</scope>
            <outputDirectory>lib/${project.artifactId}</outputDirectory>
        </dependencySet>
        <dependencySet>
            <scope>runtime</scope>
            <outputDirectory>
                webapps/${webContextName}/WEB-INF/lib
            </outputDirectory>
        </dependencySet>
    </dependencySets>
    ...
</assembly>

*:zip

<assembly>
    ...
    <dependencySets>
        <dependencySet>
            <scope>provided</scope>
            <outputDirectory>lib/${project.artifactId}</outputDirectory>
        </dependencySet>
        <dependencySet>
            <scope>runtime</scope>
            <outputDirectory>
                webapps/${webContextName}/WEB-INF/lib
            </outputDirectory>
            <excludes>
                <exclude>*:zip</exclude>
            </excludes>
        </dependencySet>
        <dependencySet>
            <scope>runtime</scope>
            <outputDirectory>
                webapps/${webContextName}/resources
            </outputDirectory>
            <includes>
                <include>*:zip</include>
            </includes>
            <unpack>true</unpack>
        </dependencySet>
    </dependencySets>
    ...
</assembly>

*:jar:resources

<asembly>
    ...
    <dependencySets>
        <dependencySet>
            <scope>runtime</scope>
            <outputDirectory>
                webapps/${webContextName}/resources
            </outputDirectory>
            <includes>
                <include>*:zip</include>
            </includes>
            <unpack>true</unpack>
            <unpackOptions>
                <excludes>
                    <exclude>**/LICENSE*</exclude>
                </excludes>
            </unpackOptions>
        </dependencySet>
    </dependencySets>
    ...
</assembly>

Multi-module builds are generally stitched together using the parent and modules sections of interrelated POMs. Typically, parent POMs specify their children in a modules section, which under normal circumstances causes the child POMs to be included in the build process of the parent. Exactly how this relationship is constructed can have important implications for the ways in which the Assembly plugin can participate in this process, but we’ll discuss that more later. For now, it’s enough to keep in mind this parent-module relationship as we discuss the moduleSets section.

Projects are stitched together into multi-module builds because they are part of a larger system. These projects are designed to be used together, and single module in a larger build has little practical value on its own. In this way, the structure of the project’s build is related to the way we expect the project (and its modules) to be used. If consider the project from the user’s perspective, it makes sense that the ideal end goal of that build would be a single, distributable file that the user can consume directly with minimum installation hassle. Since Maven multi-module builds typically follow a top-down structure, where dependency information, plugin configurations, and other information trickles down from parent to child, it seems natural that the task of rolling all of these modules into a single distribution file should fall to the topmost project. This is where the moduleSet comes into the picture.

Module sets allow the inclusion of resources that belong to each module in the project structure into the final assembly archive. Just like you can select a group of files to include in an assembly using a fileSet and a dependencySet, you can include a set of files and resources using a moduleSet to refer to modules in a multi-module build. They achieve this by enabling two basic types of module-specific inclusion: file-based, and artifact-based. Before we get into the specifics and differences between file-based and artifact-based inclusion of module resources into an assembly, let’s talk a little about selecting which modules to process.

groupId:artifactId

<assembly>
    ...
    <moduleSets>
        <moduleSet>
            <includeSubModules>false</includeSubModules>
            <excludes>
                <exclude>
                    com.mycompany.application:secret-sauce
                </exclude>
            </excludes>
            <sources>
                <outputDirectoryMapping>
                    ${module.basedir.name}
                </outputDirectoryMapping>
                <excludeSubModuleDirectories>
                    false
                </excludeSubModuleDirectories>
                <fileSets>
                    <fileSet>
                        <directory>/</directory>
                        <excludes>
                            <exclude>**/target</exclude>
                        </excludes>
                    </fileSet>
                </fileSets>
            </sources>
        </moduleSet>
    </moduleSets>
    ...
</assembly>

<assembly>
    ...
    <moduleSets>
        <moduleSet>
            <binaries>
                <attachmentClassifier>javadoc</attachmentClassifier>
                <includeDependencies>false</includeDependencies>
                <outputDirectory>apidoc-jars</outputDirectory>
            </binaries>
        </moduleSet>
    </moduleSets>
    ...
</assembly>

<assembly>
    ...
    <moduleSets>
        <moduleSet>
            <binaries>
                <outputDirectory>
                    ${module.artifactId}-${module.version}
                </outputDirectory>
                <dependencySets>
                    <dependencySet/>
                </dependencySets>
            </binaries>
        </moduleSet>
    </moduleSets>
    ...
</assembly>

The repositories section represents a slightly more exotic feature in the assembly descriptor, since few applications other than Maven can take full advantage of a Maven-repository directory structure. For this reason, and because many of its features closely resemble those in the dependencySets section, we won’t spend too much time on the repositories section of the assembly descriptor. In most cases, users who understand dependency sets should have no trouble constructing repositories via the Assembly plugin. We’re not going to motivate the repositories section; we’re not going to go through a the business of setting up a use case and walking you through the process. We’re just going to bring up a few caveats for those of you who find the need to use the repositories section.

Having said that, there are a two features particular to the repositories section that deserve some mention. The first is the includeMetadata flag. When set to true it includes metadata such as the list of real versions that correspond to -SNAPSHOT virtual versions, and by default it’s set to false. At present, the only metadata included when this flag is true is the information downloaded from Maven’s central repository.

The second feature is called groupVersionAlignments. Again, this section is a list of individual groupVersionAlignment configurations, whose purpose is to normalize all included artifacts for a particular groupId to use a single version. Each alignment entry consists of two mandatory elements - id and version - along with an optional section called excludes that supplies a list of artifactId string values which are to be excluded from this realignment. Unfortunately, this realignment doesn’t seem to modify the POMs involved in the repository, neither those related to realigned artifacts nor those that depend on realigned artifacts, so it’s difficult to imagine what the practical application for this sort of realignment would be.

In general, it’s simplest to apply the same principles you would use in dependency sets to repositories when adding them to your assembly descriptor. While the repositories section does support the above extra options, they are mainly provided for backward compatibility, and will probably be deprecated in future releases.

Now that we’ve made it through the main body of the assembly descriptor, we can close the discussion of content-related descriptor sections with something lighter: root-directory naming and site-directory handling.

Some may consider it a stylistic concern, but it’s often important to have control over the name of the root directory for your assembly, or whether the root directory is there at all. Fortunately, two configuration options in the root of the assembly descriptor make managing the archive root directory simple: includeBaseDirectory and baseDirectory. In cases like executable jar files, you probably don’t want a root directory at all. To skip it, simply set the includeBaseDirectory flag to false (it’s true by default). This will result in an archive that, when unpacked, may create more than one directory in the unpack target directory. While this is considered bad form for archives that are meant to be unpacked before use, it’s not so bad for archives that are consumable as-is.

In other cases, you may want to guarantee the name of the archive root directory regardless of the POM’s version or other information. By default, the baseDirectory element has a value equal to ${project.artifactId}-${project.version}. However, we can easily set this element to any value that consists of literal strings and expressions which can be interpolated from the current POM, such as ${project.groupId}-${project.artifactId}. This could be very good news for your documentation team! (We all have those, right?)

Another configuration available is the includeSiteDirectory flag, whose default value is false. If your project build has also constructed a website document root using the site lifecycle or the Site plugin goals, that output can be included by setting this flag to true. However, this feature is a bit limited, since it only includes the outputDirectory from the reporting section of the current POM (by default, target/site) and doesn’t take into consideration any site directories that may be available in module projects. Use it if you want, but a good fileSet specification or moduleSet specification with sources configured could serve equally well, if not better. This is yet another example of legacy configuration currently supported by the Assembly plugin for the purpose of backward compatibility. Your mileage may vary. If you really want to include a site that is aggregated from many modules, you’ll want to consider using a fileSet or moduleSet instead of setting includeSiteDirectory to true.

To round out our exploration of the assembly descriptor, we should touch briefly on two other sections: containerDescriptorHandlers and componentDescriptors. The containerDescriptorHandlers section refers to custom components that you use to extend the capabilities of the Assembly plugin. Specifically, these custom components allow you to define and handle special files which may need to be merged from the multiple constituents used to create your assembly. A good example of this might be a custom container-descriptor handler that merged web.xml files from constituent war or war-fragment files included in your assembly, in order to create the single web-application descriptor required for you to use the resulting assembly archive as a war file.

The componentDescriptors section allows you to reference external assembly-descriptor fragments and include them in the current descriptor. Component references can be any of the following:

Incidentally, when resolving a component descriptor, the Assembly plugin tries those different strategies in that exact order. The first one to succeed is used.

Component descriptors can contain many of the same content-oriented sections available in the assembly descriptor itself, with the exception of moduleSets, which is considered so specific to each project that it’s not a good candidate for reuse. Also included in a component descriptor is the containerDescriptorHandlers section, which we briefly discussed above. Component descriptors cannot contain formats, assembly id’s, or any configuration related to the base directory of the assembly archive, all of which are also considered unique to a particular assembly descriptor. While it may make sense to allow sharing of the formats section, this has not been implemented as of the 2.2-beta-2 Assembly-plugin release.

Up to now, we’ve been talking mainly about one-off solutions for building a particular type of assembly. But what do you do if you have dozens of projects that all need a particular type of assembly? In short, how can we reuse the effort we’ve invested to get our assemblies just the way we like them across more than one project without copying and pasting our assembly descriptor?

The simplest answer is to create a standardized, versioned artifact out of the assembly descriptor, and deploy it. Once that’s done, you can specify that the Assembly plugin section of your project’s POM include the assembly-descriptor artifact as a plugin-level dependency, which will prompt Maven to resolve and include that artifact in the plugin’s classpath. At that point, you can use the assembly descriptor via the descriptorRefs configuration section in the Assembly plugin declaration. To illustrate, consider this example assembly descriptor:

<assembly>
    <id>war-fragment</id>
    <formats>
        <format>zip</format>
    </formats>
    <includeBaseDirectory>false</includeBaseDirectory>
    <dependencySets>
        <dependencySet>
            <outputDirectory>WEB-INF/lib</outputDirectory>
        </dependencySet>
    </dependencySets>
    <fileSets>
        <fileSet>
            <directory>src/main/webapp</directory>
            <outputDirectory>/</outputDirectory>
            <excludes>
                <exclude>**/web.xml</exclude>
            </excludes>
        </fileSet>
    </fileSets>
</assembly>

Included in your project, this descriptor would be a useful way to bundle the project contents so that it could be unpacked directly into an existing web application in order to add to it (for adding an extending feature, say). However, if your team builds more than one of these web-fragment projects, it will likely want to reuse this descriptor rather than duplicating it. To deploy this descriptor as its own artifact, we’re going to put it in its own project, under the src/main/resources/assemblies directory.

The project structure for this assembly-descriptor artifact will look similar to the following:

|-- pom.xml
`-- src
`-- main
`-- resources
`-- assemblies
`-- web-fragment.xml

Notice the path of our web-fragment descriptor file. By default, Maven includes the files from the src/main/resources directory structure in the final jar, which means our assembly descriptor will be included with no extra configuration on our part. Also, notice the assemblies/ path prefix, the Assembly plugin expects this path prefix on all descriptors provided in the plugin classpath. It’s important that we put our descriptor in the appropriate relative location, so it will be picked up by the Assembly plugin as it executes.

Remember, this project is separate from your actual web-fragment project now; the assembly descriptor has become its own artifact with its own version and, possibly, its own release cycle. Once you install this new project using Maven, you’ll be able to reference it in your web-fragment projects. For clarity, the build process should look something like this:

$ mvn install
(...)
[INFO] [install:install]
[INFO] Installing (...)/web-fragment-descriptor/target/\
web-fragment-descriptor-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar
to /Users/~/.m2/repository/org/sonatype/mavenbook/assemblies/\
web-fragment-descriptor/1.0-SNAPSHOT/\
web-fragment-descriptor-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar
[INFO] ---------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESSFUL
[INFO] ---------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 5 seconds
(...)

Since there are no sources for the web-fragment-descriptor project, the resulting jar artifact will include nothing but our web-fragment assembly descriptor. Now, let’s use this new descriptor artifact:

<project>
    (...)
    <artifactId>my-web-fragment</artifactId>
    (...)
    <build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <artifactId>maven-assembly-plugin</artifactId>
                <version>2.2-beta-2</version>
                <dependencies>
                    <dependency>
                        <groupId>org.sonatype.mavenbook.assemblies</groupId>
                        <artifactId>web-fragment-descriptor</artifactId>
                        <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
                    </dependency>
                </dependencies>
                <executions>
                    <execution>
                        <id>assemble</id>
                        <phase>package</phase>
                        <goals>
                            <goal>single</goal>
                        </goals>
                        <configuration>
                            <descriptorRefs>
                                <descriptorRef>web-fragment</descriptorRef>
                            </descriptorRefs>
                        </configuration>
                    </execution>
                </executions>
            </plugin>
            (...)
        </plugins>
    </build>
    (...)
</project>

Two things are special about this Assembly plugin configuration:

Now, you’re free to reuse the POM configuration above in as many projects as you like, with the assurance that all of their web-fragment assemblies will turn out the same. As you need to make adjustments to the assembly format - maybe to include other resources, or to fine-tune the dependency and file sets - you can simply increment the version of the assembly descriptor’s project, and release it again. POMs referencing the assembly-descriptor artifact can then adopt this new version of the descriptor as they are able.

One final point about assembly-descriptor reuse: you may want to consider sharing the plugin configuration itself as well as publishing the descriptor as an artifact. This is a fairly simple step; you simply add the configuration listed above to the pluginManagement section of your parent POM, then reference the managed plugin configuration from your module POM like this:

(...)
<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <artifactId>maven-assembly-plugin</artifactId>
        </plugin>
        (...)

If you’ve added the rest of the plugin’s configuration - listed in the previous example - to the pluginManagement section of the project’s parent POM, then each project inheriting from that parent POM can add a minimal entry like the one above and take advantage of an advanced assembly format in their own builds.

As mentioned above, the Assembly plugin provides multiple ways of creating many archive formats. Distribution archives are typically very good examples of this, since they often combine modules from a multi-module build, along with their dependencies and possibly, other files and artifacts besides these. The distribution aims to include all these different sources into a single archive that the user can download, unpack, and run with convenience. However, we also examined some of the potential drawbacks of using the moduleSets section of the assembly descriptor - namely, that the parent-child relationships between POMs in a build can prevent the availability of module artifacts in some cases.

Specifically, if module POMs reference as their parent the POM that contains the Assembly-plugin configuration, that parent project will be built ahead of the module projects when the multi-module build executes. The parent’s assembly expects to find artifacts in place for its modules, but these module projects are waiting on the parent itself to finish building, a gridlock situation is reached and the parent build cannot succeed (since it’s unable to find artifacts for its module projects). In other words, the child project depends on the parent project which in turn depends on the child project.

As an example, consider the assembly descriptor below, designed to be used from the top-level project of a multi-module hierarchy:

<assembly>
    <id>distribution</id>
    <formats>
        <format>zip</format>
        <format>tar.gz</format>
        <format>tar.bz2</format>
    </formats>

    <moduleSets>
        <moduleSet>
            <includes>
                <include>*-web</include>
            </includes>
            <binaries>
                <outputDirectory>/</outputDirectory>
                <unpack>true</unpack>
                <includeDependencies>true</includeDependencies>
                <dependencySets>
                    <dependencySet>
                        <outputDirectory>/WEB-INF/lib</outputDirectory>
                    </dependencySet>
                </dependencySets>
            </binaries>
        </moduleSet>
        <moduleSet>
            <includes>
                <include>*-addons</include>
            </includes>
            <binaries>
                <outputDirectory>/WEB-INF/lib</outputDirectory>
                <includeDependencies>true</includeDependencies>
                <dependencySets>
                    <dependencySet/>
                </dependencySets>
            </binaries>
        </moduleSet>
    </moduleSets>
</assembly>

Given a parent project - called app-parent - with three modules called app-core, app-web, and app-addons, notice what happens when we try to execute this multi-module build:

$ mvn package
[INFO] Reactor build order:
[INFO]   app-parent <----- PARENT BUILDS FIRST
[INFO]   app-core
[INFO]   app-web
[INFO]   app-addons
[INFO] ---------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Building app-parent
[INFO]task-segment: [package]
[INFO] ---------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] [site:attach-descriptor]
[INFO] [assembly:single {execution: distro}]
[INFO] Reading assembly descriptor: src/main/assembly/distro.xml
[INFO] ---------------------------------------------------------------
[ERROR] BUILD ERROR
[INFO] ---------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Failed to create assembly: Artifact:
org.sonatype.mavenbook.assemblies:app-web:jar:1.0-SNAPSHOT (included by module)
does not have an artifact with a file. Please ensure the package phase is
run before the assembly is generated.
...

The parent project - app-parent - builds first. This is because each of the other projects lists that POM as its parent, which causes it to be forced to the front of the build order. The app-web module, which is the first module to be processed in the assembly descriptor, hasn’t been built yet. Therefore, it has no artifact associated with it, and the assembly cannot succeed.

One workaround for this is to remove the executions section of the Assembly-plugin declaration, that binds the plugin to the package lifecycle phase in the parent POM, keeping the configuration section intact. Then, execute Maven with two command-line tasks: the first, package, to build the multi-module project graph, and a second, assembly:assembly, as a direct invocation of the assembly plugin to consume the artifacts built on the previous run, and create the distribution assembly. The command line for such a build might look like this:

$ mvn package assembly:assembly

However, this approach has several drawbacks. First, it makes the distribution-assembly process more of a manual task that can increase the complexity and potential for error in the overall build process significantly. Additionally, it could mean that attached artifacts - which are associated in memory as the project build executes - are not reachable on the second pass without resorting to file-system references.

Instead of using a moduleSet to collect the artifacts from your multi-module build, it often makes more sense to employ a low-tech approach: using a dedicated distribution project module and inter-project dependencies. In this approach, you create a new module in your build whose sole purpose is to assemble the distribution. This module POM contains dependency references to all the other modules in the project hierarchy, and it configures the Assembly plugin to be bound the package phase of its build lifecycle. The assembly descriptor itself uses the dependencySets section instead of the moduleSets section to collect module artifacts and determine where to include them in the resulting assembly archive. This approach escapes the pitfalls associated with the parent-child relationship discussed above, and has the additional advantage of using a simpler configuration section within the assembly descriptor itself to do the job.

To do this, we can create a new project structure that’s very similar to the one used for the module-set approach above, with the addition of a new distribution project, we might end up with five POMs in total: app-parent, app-core, app-web, app-addons, and app-distribution. The new app-distribution POM looks similar to the following:

<project>
    <parent>
        <artifactId>app-parent</artifactId>
        <groupId>org.sonatype.mavenbook.assemblies</groupId>
        <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
    </parent>
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
    <artifactId>app-distribution</artifactId>
    <name>app-distribution</name>

    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <artifactId>app-web</artifactId>
            <groupId>org.sonatype.mavenbook.assemblies</groupId>
            <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
            <type>war</type>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <artifactId>app-addons</artifactId>
            <groupId>org.sonatype.mavenbook.assemblies</groupId>
            <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
        </dependency>
        <!-- Not necessary since it's brought in via app-web.
             <dependency> [2]
                 <artifactId>app-core</artifactId>
                 <groupId>org.sonatype.mavenbook.assemblies</groupId>
                 <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
             </dependency>
             -->
    </dependencies>
</project>

Notice that we have to include dependencies for the other modules in the project structure, since we don’t have a modules section to rely on in this POM. Also, notice that we’re not using an explicit dependency on app-core. Since it’s also a dependency of app-web, we don’t need to process it (or, avoid processing it) twice.

Next, when we move the distro.xml assembly descriptor into the app-distribution project, we must also change it to use a dependencySets section, like this:

<assembly>
    ...
    <dependencySets>
        <dependencySet>
            <includes>
                <include>*-web</include>
            </includes>
            <useTransitiveDependencies>false</useTransitiveDependencies>
            <outputDirectory>/</outputDirectory>
            <unpack>true</unpack>
        </dependencySet>
        <dependencySet>
            <excludes>
                <exclude>*-web</exclude>
            </excludes>
            <useProjectArtifact>false</useProjectArtifact>
            <outputDirectory>/WEB-INF/lib</outputDirectory>
        </dependencySet>
    </dependencySets>
    ...
</assembly>

This time, if we run the build from the top-level project directory, we get better news:

$ mvn package
(...)
[INFO] ---------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Reactor Summary:
[INFO] ---------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] module-set-distro-parent ...............SUCCESS [3.070s]
[INFO] app-core .............................. SUCCESS [2.970s]
[INFO] app-web ............................... SUCCESS [1.424s]
[INFO] app-addons ............................ SUCCESS [0.543s]
[INFO] app-distribution ...................... SUCCESS [2.603s]
[INFO] ---------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] ---------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESSFUL
[INFO] ---------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 10 seconds
[INFO] Finished at: Thu May 01 18:00:09 EDT 2008
[INFO] Final Memory: 16M/29M
[INFO] ---------------------------------------------------------------

As you can see, the dependency-set approach is much more stable and - at least until Maven’s internal project-sorting logic catches up with the Assembly plugin’s capabilities, - involves less opportunity to get things wrong when running a build.