Mule Maven Plugin & Deployments to Standalone Mule Instances

This is an issue I encountered recently whilst trying enable automated deployments to a local instance of Mulesoft EE Edition v3.8.3 and could not find any solution on the web. I am documenting it here in case anyone else faces the same issue and is looking for a solution.

The mule-maven-plugin is unable to copy the application ZIP file to the apps directory.

To resolve, follow the steps below.

1. Use mule mule-app-maven-plugin to build the application - set the flag copyToAppsDirectory to false.

<plugin>
     <groupId>org.mule.tools.maven</groupId>
     <artifactId>mule-app-maven-plugin</artifactId>
     <version>${mule.tools.version}</version>
     <extensions>true</extensions>
     <configuration>
         <copyToAppsDirectory>false</copyToAppsDirectory>
      </configuration>
  </plugin>

2. Add a plugin to copy the generated artifact to MULE_HOME/apps folder. This is done using the maven-dependency-plugin. This is added after the mule maven plugin section of the POM.

<plugin>
   <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
   <artifactId>maven-dependency-plugin</artifactId>
   <version>2.10</version>
   <executions>
      <execution>
         <id>copy</id>
         <phase>deploy</phase>
         <goals>
            <goal>copy</goal>
         </goals>
         <configuration>
             <artifactItems>
                  <artifactItem>
                     <groupId>com.mycompany</groupId>
                     <artifactId>order-system</artifactId>
                     <version>1.0.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
                     <type>zip</type>
                     <overWrite>false</overWrite>
                     <outputDirectory>C:/mule-home/apps</outputDirectory>
                     <destFileName>order-system-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.zip</destFileName>
                   </artifactItem>
              </artifactItems>
              <overWriteReleases>false</overWriteReleases>
              <overWriteSnapshots>true</overWriteSnapshots>
         </configuration>
      </execution>
  </executions>
</plugin>

3. Disable the default execution of the maven deploy plugin to prevent deploying the generated artifact to an external repository.

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-deploy-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.8.2</version>
    <configuration>
        <skip>true</skip>
    </configuration>
</plugin>