Camel Maven Plugin

The Camel Maven Plugin supports the following goals

  • camel:run - To run your Camel application

  • camel:dev - To run your Camel application in developer mode

  • camel:debug - To run your Camel application in debug mode

  • camel:prepare-fatjar - To prepare your Camel application for being packaged as a fat-jar (such as by maven-assembly-plugin)

camel:run

The camel:run goal of the Camel Maven Plugin is used to run your Camel Spring configurations in a forked JVM from Maven. A good example application to get you started is the Spring Example.

cd examples/camel-example-spring
mvn camel:run

This makes it very easy to spin up and test your routing rules without having to write a main(…​) method; it also lets you create multiple jars to host different sets of routing rules and easily test them independently.

How this works is that the plugin will compile the source code in the maven project, then boot up a Spring ApplicationContext using the XML configuration files on the classpath at META-INF/spring/*.xml

If you want to boot up your Camel routes a little faster, you could try the camel:embedded instead.

Options

The maven plugin run goal supports the following options which can be configured from the command line (use -D syntax), or defined in the pom.xml file in the <configuration> tag.

Parameter

Default Value

Description

duration

-1

Sets the time duration (seconds) that the application will run for before terminating. A value ⇐ 0 will run forever.

durationIdle

-1

Sets the idle time duration (seconds) duration that the application can be idle before terminating. A value ⇐ 0 will run forever.

durationMaxMessages

-1

Sets the duration of maximum number of messages that the application will process before terminating.

logClasspath

false

Whether to log the classpath when starting

loggingLevel

OFF

Whether to use built-in console logging (uses log4j), which does not require to add any logging dependency to your project. However, the logging is fixed to log to the console, with a color style that is similar to Spring Boot. You can change the root logging level to: FATAL, ERROR, WARN, INFO, DEBUG, TRACE, OFF

Logging the classpath

You can configure whether the classpath should be logged when camel:run executes. You can enable this in the configuration using:

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.apache.camel</groupId>
  <artifactId>camel-maven-plugin</artifactId>
  <configuration>
    <logClasspath>true</logClasspath>
  </configuration>
</plugin>

Using built-in logging

If you want quickly to have logging to console, you can use the built-in logging by setting the logging level as shown:

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.apache.camel</groupId>
  <artifactId>camel-maven-plugin</artifactId>
  <configuration>
    <loggingLevel>INFO</loggingLevel>
  </configuration>
</plugin>

This runs the application with console logging, in color that is similar to Spring Boot logging. This is default turned off, to use the configured logging system in the project.

The idea with the built-in logging is that you sometimes want to avoid messing with setting up logging, and just want a quick and easy log to console that looks good.

camel:dev

The camel:dev is an extension to camel:run to run the Camel application in developer mode. In this mode, among others, Camel will use hot-reloading of DSL routes (xml, yaml and java) that are located from the src/main/resources directory.

Options

The maven plugin dev goal supports the following options which can be configured from the command line (use -D syntax), or defined in the pom.xml file in the <configuration> tag.

Parameter

Default Value

Description

routesDirectory

src/main/resources

To watch the directory for file changes which triggers a live reload of the Camel routes on-the-fly.

duration

-1

Sets the time duration (seconds) that the application will run for before terminating. A value ⇐ 0 will run forever.

durationIdle

-1

Sets the idle time duration (seconds) duration that the application can be idle before terminating. A value ⇐ 0 will run forever.

durationMaxMessages

-1

Sets the duration of maximum number of messages that the application will process before terminating.

logClasspath

false

Whether to log the classpath when starting

loggingLevel

OFF

Whether to use built-in console logging (uses log4j), which does not require to add any logging dependency to your project. However, the logging is fixed to log to the console, with a color style that is similar to Spring Boot. You can change the root logging level to: FATAL, ERROR, WARN, INFO, DEBUG, TRACE, OFF

camel:debug

The camel:debug is an extension to camel:dev to run the Camel application in debug mode which allows to debug the Camel routes thanks to the Camel textual route debugger.

Options

The maven plugin debug goal supports the following options which can be configured from the command line (use -D syntax), or defined in the pom.xml file in the <configuration> tag.

Parameter

Default Value

Description

suspend

true

Indicates whether the message processing done by Camel should be suspended as long as a debugger is not attached.

camel:prepare-fatjar

The camel:prepare-fatjar goal of the Camel Maven Plugin is used to prepare your Camel application for being packaged as a fat jar. The goal scans the Maven dependencies to discover Camel JARs and extract if they have type converters, which gets merged together into a single uber file stored in target/classes/META-INF/services/org/apache/camel/UberTypeConverterLoader.

This uber loader file contains all the combined type converters the Camel application uses at runtime. They are merged together into this single file.

This is needed as otherwise the fat jar maven plugins (such as maven-assembly-plugin, or maven-shade-plugin) causes the TypeConverterLoader files to be overwritten in the assembled JAR which causes not all type converters to be loaded by Camel.

The UberTypeConverterLoader ensures they all type converters gets loaded as this file contains all the known type converter files.

To use this goal, you can add the following to your Camel application pom.xml file:

  <build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.camel</groupId>
        <artifactId>camel-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>${camel.version}</version>
        <executions>
          <execution>
            <goals>
              <goal>prepare-fatjar</goal>
            </goals>
          </execution>
        </executions>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>

For example to use this with the maven-assembly-plugin you can do as below. Remember to specify the class name of your main class where it says com.foo.NameOfMainClass:

  <build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.camel</groupId>
        <artifactId>camel-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>${camel.version}</version>
        <executions>
          <execution>
            <goals>
              <goal>prepare-fatjar</goal>
            </goals>
          </execution>
        </executions>
      </plugin>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-assembly-plugin</artifactId>
        <configuration>
          <archive>
            <manifest>
              <mainClass>com.foo.NameOfMainClass</mainClass>
            </manifest>
          </archive>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>