Running a Separate Java Process from Maven Mojo

While digging in various existing Maven Mojos and looking for easiest way to run a separate java process from Maven Mojo, in exec-maven-plugin I’ve found reference to nice helper class from Plexus Common Utilities named Commandline.

So, to run java (or any other) process using CommandLine and CommandLineUtils classes:

import org.codehaus.plexus.util.cli.Commandline;

/**
 * @parameter expression="${java.home}"
 * @required
 */
protected File javaHome;

public void run() {
  Commandline cmd = new Commandline();
  cmd.setExecutable(getJavaExecutable().getAbsolutePath());
  cmd.setWorkingDirectory( ... );
  cmd.addArguments( ... );

  StreamConsumer stdout = ...
  int result = CommandLineUtils.executeCommandLine(cmd, stdout, stdout);
}

private File getJavaExecutable() {
  return new File(new File(javaHome, "bin"), "java");
}

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.codehaus.plexus</groupId>
  <artifactId>plexus-utils</artifactId>
  <version>1.5.15</version>
</dependency>

I’m not sure if it is the “Maven way” of getting path to java executable but it should work just fine in all Java-supported OS’es.

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