Bootstrapping a Maven project

This guide makes the choice of using Apache Maven as the build tool, primarily because it is very well integrated with the major integrated development environments. You can equally use another build tool such as Gradle.

The Vert.x community offers a template project structure from https://github.com/vert-x3/vertx-maven-starter that can be cloned. Since you will likely want to use (Git) version control as well, the fastest route is to clone the repository, delete its .git/ folder and then create a new Git repository:

git clone https://github.com/vert-x3/vertx-maven-starter.git vertx-wiki
cd vertx-wiki
rm -rf .git
git init

The project offers a sample verticle as well as a unit test. You can safely delete all .java files beneath src/ to hack on the wiki, but before doing so you may test that the project builds and runs successfully:

mvn package exec:java

You will notice that the Maven project pom.xml does 2 interesting things:

1. it uses the Maven Shade Plugin to create a single Jar archive with all required dependencies, suffixed by -fat.jar, also called “a fat Jar”, and

2. it uses the Exec Maven Plugin to provide the exec:java goal that in turns starts the application through the Vert.x io.vertx.core.Launcher class. This is actually equivalent to running using the vertx command-line tool that ships in the Vert.x distribution.

Finally, you will notice the presence of the redeploy.sh and redeploy.bat scripts that you can alternatively use for automatic compilation and redeployment upon code changes. Note that doing so requires ensuring that the VERTICLE variable in these scripts matches the main verticle to be used.

mkdir vertx-wiki
cd vertx-wiki
mvn io.fabric8:vertx-maven-plugin:1.0.13:setup -DvertxVersion=3.8.0
git init