This article covers how to get NetBeans to use a Maven installation on a remote server. This has been tested with Maven 3.0.2 but should work on any other version. It may also work for other IDE’s like Eclipse if you can get them to use an alternate maven installation other than the internal one.
Sometimes you may want to run maven on a remote machine from inside the NetBeans IDE. For me this is down to available memory on the local machine is limited enough on large projects that both NetBeans and Maven compete slowing the local machine down as it swaps the IDE in and out of main memory.
Another instance may be to perform builds on a standard OS (Linux in this case) rather than the OS running the IDE (OSX here).
Now this is pretty easy to implement. Here I have the IDE running on OSX and the builds on Linux (Ubuntu 10.10) but if you can get the prerequisites running in theory any OS should work.
Prerequisites
- ssh access to both machines with public key authentication working
- sshfs configured for mounting drives (you can use nfs or smb if you wish)
- maven 3.0.2 installed on both machines – both machines need the same version
Setting up the environment
In this example:
- sabrina – The local machine running NetBeans. It’s running OS X
- kira – The remote machine which will run the builds. It’s running Ubuntu 10.10
Shared filesystems
The remote needs to have access to the local project directories for maven to work. As I have all development under a dev directory under home, on the remote machine I simply create a dev directory and then mount the local host from it using sshfs
<br /> peter@kira:~$ mkdir dev<br /> peter@kira:~$ sshfs peter@sabrina:dev dev<br />
If you have a custom settings.xml file, make sure it’s also present on the remote’s .m2 directory, i.e.
<br /> sabrina:~ peter$ scp .m2/settings.xml peter@kira:.m2<br />
Finally NetBeans needs access to the built artifacts, so to do this we mount the remotes .m2/repository locally. I use .m2/remoterepo for this
<br /> sabrina:~ peter$ mkdir .m2/remoterepo<br /> sabrina:~ peter$ sshfs peter@kira:.m2/repository .m2/remoterepo<br />
Maven
Next install your maven installation on both machines. I keep mine in the same place, but thats optional. For the purposes of this article I’m going to use /usr/local/apache/apache-maven-3.0.2
Next on the machine running NetBeans you need to create a duplicate installation /usr/local/apache/apache-maven-3.0.2-remote We need to have a copy for NetBeans to recognise it as a valid environment later on.
Now in this new installation we need to replace the /usr/local/apache/apache-maven-3.0.2-remote/bin/mvn script with the following:
<br />
#!/bin/bash<br />
#<br />
# Enable NetBeans 7.0 beta to run maven on a remote host</p>
<p># Pass the maven args as is<br />
MVN_ARGS="$@"</p>
<p># The current directory, NetBeans does a cd so this will be the project<br />
# directory.<br />
#<br />
# If you need to translate the path between local and remote machines then<br />
# pass the output of pwd through sed first<br />
REMOTE_PROJECT_DIR=$(pwd)</p>
<p># Execute maven on remote host<br />
REMOTE_USER=peter<br />
REMOTE_HOST=kira</p>
<p># Location of remote maven installation<br />
REMOTE_MAVEN_HOME=/usr/local/apache/apache-maven-3.0.2</p>
<p># JAVA_HOME on remote machine<br />
REMOTE_JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/</p>
<p># ======================================<br />
# DO NOT EDIT ANYTHING BEYOND THIS POINT<br />
# ======================================</p>
<p># Remote mvn command<br />
REMOTE_MVN=$REMOTE_MAVEN_HOME/bin/mvn</p>
<p># Build the commands to run remotely<br />
CMD="cd ${REMOTE_PROJECT_DIR};"<br />
CMD="${CMD}export JAVA_HOME=${REMOTE_JAVA_HOME};"<br />
CMD="${CMD}$REMOTE_MVN ${MVN_ARGS}"</p>
<p># Now run the remote build<br />
echo<br />
echo ------------------------------------------------------------------------<br />
echo Executing remote build on $REMOTE_HOST as $REMOTE_USER<br />
echo Remote command: $CMD<br />
echo ------------------------------------------------------------------------<br />
echo<br />
exec ssh ${REMOTE_USER}@${REMOTE_HOST} "${CMD}"<br />
In this script you need to ensure that the settings are correct:
- REMOTE_USER and REMOTE_HOST point to your remote host,
- REMOTE_MAVEN_HOME is the location of where maven is installed on the remote host,
- REMOTE_JAVA_HOME is the location of the JDK on the remote host.
Now you may need to alter the line defining REMOTE_PROJECT_DIR. Shown above it gets set to the directory containing the maven project on the local host. If this differs on the remote then you need to either change to translate this to the location on the remote.
For example I have my NetBeans projects under a directory called dev in my home directory. As this is OS X that becomes /Users/peter/dev however on Linux the path is /home/peter/dev
I get around this by on the remote simply creating a symlink for /Users pointing to /home but you could modify the script to do that for you.
Configuring NetBeans
The last step is getting NetBeans to use the new remote.
Start NetBeans and enter preferences Then the Miscellaneous tab and finally Maven:
- Under Maven Home select Browse and select the dummy remote installation, in my case /usr/local/apache/apache-maven-3.0.2-remote
- Under Local Repository select Browse and point it at .m2/remoterepo
- Select OK
Now if you try to run any build you’ll now see it run on the remote machine and as far as NetBeans is concerned it’s running locally. For example in the NetBeans output window you should see something like the following:
<br /> cd /Users/peter/dev/misc/example; JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Home /usr/local/apache/apache-maven-3.0.2-remote/bin/mvn --batch-mode --lax-checksums --fail-fast --no-plugin-updates --batch-mode clean</p> <p>------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /> Executing remote build on 192.168.30.108 as peter<br /> Remote command: cd /Users/peter/dev/misc/example;export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/;/usr/local/apache/apache-maven-3.0.2/bin/mvn --batch-mode --lax-checksums --fail-fast --no-plugin-updates --batch-mode clean<br /> ------------------------------------------------------------------------</p> <p>Command line option -npu is deprecated and will be removed in future Maven versions.<br /> Scanning for projects...<br /> ------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /> Reactor Build Order:<br />
Future invocations
Once setup, whenever you restart either machines you simply need to mount each others drives before starting NetBeans as all the rest should then be setup.
<br /> sabrina:~ peter$ sshfs peter@kira:.m2/repository .m2/remoterepo<br /> peter@kira:~$ sshfs peter@sabrina:dev dev<br />
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