Integrate Protocol Buffers into Maven2 build

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I'm experimenting with Protocol Buffers in an existing, fairly vanilla Maven 2 project. Currently, I invoke a shell script every time I need to update my generated sources. This is obviously a hassle, as I would like the sources to be generated automatically before each build. Hopefully without resorting to shameful hackery.

So, my question is two-fold:

  1. Long shot: is there a "Protocol Buffers plugin" for Maven 2 that can achieve the above in an automagic way? There's a branch on Google Code whose author appears to have taken a shot at implementing such a plugin. Unfortunately, it hasn't passed code review or been merged into protobuf trunk. The status of that plugin is thus unknown.

  2. Probably more realistic: lacking an actual plugin, how else might I go about invoking protoc from my Maven 2 build? I suppose I may be able to wire up my existing shell script into an antrun invocation or something similar.

Personal experiences are most appreciated.

protocol-buffers maven-2
9 Answers

I just tried a less official but very recent (v 0.1.7) fork from https://github.com/dtrott/maven-protoc-plugin and it worked very well, courtesy of David Trott. I tested it with a couple of Maven modules one of which contained DTO-style messages and the other a service depending on them. I borrowed the plugin configuration MaxA posted on Oct 16 '09, I had protoc on my PATH and I added

<temporaryProtoFileDirectory>${basedir}/target/temp</temporaryProtoFileDirectory>

right after

<protocExecutable>protoc</protocExecutable>.

What is really nice is that all I had to do is to declare a normal dependency from the service module on the DTO module. The plugin was able to resolve proto files dependencies by finding the proto files packaged with the DTO module, extracting them to a temporary directory and using while generating code for the service. And it was smart enough not to package a second copy of the generated DTO classes with the service module.

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