I blogged about my experience about creating an IPS package several days ago. Since my motivation for this was to package Hudson, which is built by Maven, I wanted to integrate the package creation process into a Maven build.

Toward this end, I packaged IPS as a Maven artifact, then I used that to write maven-makepkgs-plugin. This plugin assumes a working Python 2.4 on your system, but otherwise it can fully automate the IPS packagin creation and has no platform specific pieces.

You'd be writing a src/proto.py like the following, which describes the package and files that are in it. The script gets several key parameters, like version, from Maven:

# definition of the IPS package.
# see https://updatecenter2.dev.java.net/maven-makepkgs-plugin/ for more about this

import builder;

# IPS can't do SNAPSHOT
version = builder.props['version']
if version.endswith("-SNAPSHOT"):
    version = version[:-9];

pkg = builder.build_pkg(name="hudson", version=version+",0-0")
pkg.update({
    "attributes"    : {
        "pkg.summary" : "Hudson",
        "pkg.description" : "Extensible continuous integration system",
    }
})


pkg.addfile("/usr/local/bin/hudson.war",{"file":"./target/hudson.war"})
pkg.addfile("/var/svc/manifest/application/hudson.xml",{"file":"../ips/hudson.xml"})
# this is the Hudson home directory
pkg.mkdirs("/var/lib/hudson")

This will be then hooked into your POM. In my case, I didn't want to create a package for every build and only during the release, so I separated this out into a profile, which then gets activated during the release through maven-release-plugin configuration. But the snippet below shows how to run it.

    <profile>
      <!-- profile for creating Hudson IPS package -->
      <id>ips</id>
      <build>
        <plugins>
          <plugin>
            <groupId>org.jvnet.updatecenter2</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-makepkgs-plugin</artifactId>
            <executions>
              <execution>
                <goals>
                  <goal>package</goal>
                </goals>
              </execution>
            </executions>
          </plugin>
        </plugins>
      </build>
    </profile>

By default, the plugin creates an IPS package and put that into a .tgz file. This will be attached to the build with the .ipstgz extension, and deployed to the repository. So one idea that I have is to write a separate program, which reads Nexus repository index and pick up all .ipstgz file, and create an IPS repository. In this way, we can reuse the existing Maven publishing mechanism (which is much better than that of IPS today) to manage an IPS repository.

See the plugin website for more details. If anyone is interested in helping this effort, please drop us a note.