frontend-maven-plugin: checksum computation is missing some frontend ressources

[murdos]

The frontend-maven-plugin module setup the checksum-maven-plugin to compute the checksum of frontend resources, and avoid running again all npm tasks (build and tests).

However the list of resources is incomplete, and is missing at least:

• src/test/webapp/**/*.*
• tsconfig.build.json
• vite.config.ts
• vitest.config.ts
• specific angular configuration files?
• ...

[murdos]

If we don't want to include tests resources, and only skip frontend build, we should use a dedicated maven property (e.g. skip.frontend.build) that would not prevent other npm tasks to run (such as npm test):

<plugin>
        <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>${maven-antrun-plugin.version}</version>
        <executions>
          <execution>
            <id>eval-frontend-checksum</id>
            <phase>generate-resources</phase>
            <goals>
              <goal>run</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
              <target>
                <condition else="false" property="skip.frontend.build" value="true">

and

      <plugin>
        <groupId>com.github.eirslett</groupId>
        <artifactId>frontend-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>${frontend-maven-plugin.version}</version>
        <executions>
          <execution>
            <id>npm install</id>
            <goals>
              <goal>npm</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
              <skip>${skip.frontend.build}</skip>
            </configuration>
          </execution>
          <execution>
            <id>build front</id>
            <phase>generate-resources</phase>
            <goals>
              <goal>npm</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
              <skip>${skip.frontend.build}</skip>
              <arguments>run build</arguments>
              <environmentVariables>
                <APP_VERSION>${project.version}</APP_VERSION>
              </environmentVariables>
              <npmInheritsProxyConfigFromMaven>false</npmInheritsProxyConfigFromMaven>
            </configuration>
          </execution>

[pascalgrimaud]

What do you think about extracting this logic into a dedicated module, instead of keeping in frontend-maven-plugin module ?
So we could have new specific modules, dedicated to each front ?

[murdos]

This is a good idea! This would also make this checksum logic optional: you can add it only when you need it.