Maven: Re-use a POM file in every project.

Question

My goal is pretty simple actually but since there are multiple (and seemingly complex ways to do this) I wonder what I need to do... So I have certain runtime libraries (ADF libraries in particular) that are needed to be added to every project. This parent pom file will just have JAR dependencies in it. How can I use this pom file from a child pom file?

Answer 1

If the child POM file is actually a child (i.e. declares its parent), then it will inherit the dependencies and there is nothing left for you to do.

Answer 2

I don't think that using inheritance is a good solution here. Even if every project uses ADF artifacts, you don't want all poms to get these dependencies so declaring them in a corporate parent pom is not really an option.

So, instead, my recommendation would be to create a project with pom packaging to group the ADF dependencies together:

<project>
  <groupId>com.mycompany</groupId>
  <artifactId>adf-deps</artifactId>
  <version>1.0</version>
  <packaging>pom</packaging>
  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>some.groupId</groupId>
      <artifactId>adf-artifact-1</artifactId>
      <version>${jdev.version}</version>
    </dependency>
    ...
    <dependency>
      <groupId>some.groupId</groupId>
      <artifactId>adf-artifact-n</artifactId>
      <version>${jdev.version}</version>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
  <properties>
    <jdev.version>10.1.3</jdev.version>
  </properties>
</project>

Then, install/deploy this project and declare it as dependency in any project that needs the ADF artifacts:

<project>
  ...
  <dependencies>
    ...
    <dependency>
      <groupId>com.mycompany</groupId>
      <artifactId>adf-deps</artifactId>
      <version>1.0</version>
      <type>pom</type>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
</project>