Migrating existing applications to #SAPNWCloud with Apache Maven

My goal was to use maven to deploy an existing application to NetWeaver Cloud.  SAP Research recently released a maven plug-in (on github!) that allows operational tasks for SAP NetWeaver Cloud to be performed via command line / maven. This functionality was created primarily to be used in conjunction with the Spring Roo Add-On.

I was interested in deploying a stink normal war file to NetWeaver Cloud via maven.  This sort of task might be performed by individuals interested in migrating existing applications to the NetWeaver Cloud.  The application I selected was pretty basic. It wasn’t even created via maven. It was just a war file.

Steps

• I took the pom.xml and nwcloud.properties from an existing Spring Roo project that I had previously used to create an application for NetWeaver Cloud.  I copied both files into a new folder. I know I was lazy – the pom.xml contains a bunch of Roo / Spring Source specific code.  If you want to use an existing pom.xml and haven’t set up the nwcloud.properties file, there is a good description how to do this on the github page.
• In the pom.xml file, I changed the following fields to my application name

<artifactId>aji</artifactId>

<packaging>war</packaging>

<version>0.1.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT</version>

<name>aji</name>

If I didn’t reuse the pom.xml from the Spring Roo integration, then I wouldn’t have had to make these changes.

• I created a new folder called target and copied the war file that I wanted to deploy to this folder
• I changed the name of the war file to aji-0.1.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT.war. If my pom.xml had already existed, then I wouldn’t have to make this change.
• I called “mvn nwcloud:deploy nwcloud:start”
• My application was deployed.

This was a relatively simple application that didn’t use a database, authentication, etc. If the application had additional functionality, the migration would have probably been more complicated.