How to customize MANIFEST files in WAR using Maven?

A war file contains MANIFEST files which is created by Maven. This post explains how to customize a manifest files to add our own values, which may get reflected while deploying on application servers like websphere.

The post How to create java war (web archive) file using Maven?  explains in detail about building war file for sample application using Maven. Refer it for creating your own simple webapp. This post is the continuation to it.

When you explode the war file created for the sample application code described in my previous post, it contains the below directory structure.

   simple-1.1-SNAPSHOT

       images/springsource.png

       jsp/hello.jsp

       META-INF

           maven/com.rsa.siddesh.simple/simple

              pom.properties

              pom.xml

           MANIFEST.MF

     WEB-INF

          web.xml

          classes

            examples/Hello.class

            images/springsource.png

          lib/servlet-api-2.5.jar

       index.html

The default MANIFEST.MF created by Maven looks like this

MANIFEST.MF

   Manifest-Version: 1.0

   Archiver-Version: Plexus Archiver

   Created-By: Apache Maven

   Built-By: guruss1

   Build-Jdk: 1.6.0_16

We can add many values to it through Maven.

1)