maven assemblies. Putting each dependency with transitive dependencies in own directory?

I have a maven project which consists of a few modules. This is to be deployed on a client machine and will involve installing Tomcat and will make use of NSIS for installer. There is a separate application which monitors tomcat and can restart it, perform updates, etc.

So, I have the modules setup as fol开发者_如何学JAVAlows:

project
  +-- client (all code, handlers, for the war)
  +-- client-common - (shared code, shared between monitor and client)
  +-- client-web - (the war, basically just uses war has applicationcontext, web.xml,etc)
  +-- monitor - (the monitor application jar. Uses wrapper to run)

So, I need to create an installer. I was planning on creating another module which would be the installer. This is where I would have tomcat directory and I'd like maven to "assemble" everything and then run NSIS so I can create the final installer.

However, I need to have the monitor jar file in a directory and then have all monitors dependencies in a lib/ directory. The final directory structure should be:

project-installer-directory/monitor/monitor-version.jar
project-installer-directory/monitor/lib/monitor-dep-1.jar
project-installer-directory/monitor/lib/monitor-dep-2.jar
project-installer-directory/monitor/lib/monitor-dep-3.jar
project-installer-directory/webapps/client-web.war

Where in the client-web\WEB-INF\lib directory we will have all client-web's dependencies after it is exploded. That works, I have the .war file. What I am having problems with is getting the monitor module dependencies independent of the dependencies of the client-web module.

I tried to just create the installer module and make the monitor and client-web dependencies, but when I use dependencies-copy it gives me everything. Not what I want.

I'm leaning towards creating a new module called monitor-assembly or something to give me a zip file which contains the directory format I need, but that is yet another module.

Can someone please help me with the correct way to accomplish this?

thanks!

The most elegant would be to write an own Maven plugin or to extend maven-dependency-plugin. Actually what you need is quite close to dependency:copy-dependencies, but you need a possibility to specify which artifact you want to start with. As I see from the code, this is not possible at the moment.

Further idea: You can create one zip assembly per module (including module dependencies you need) and use dependency:unpack to unpack these zips in your installer module.