How to get notified of updates to public maven repositories for new plugins?

Question

Are there any tools which will notifiy you automatically of any new plugin additions from public maven repositories (e.g. Apache | Codehaus | JBoss | Sourceforge maven repository ...)

Answer 1

Not an automatic solution but you can use the Maven Versions Plugin has a versions:display-plugin-updates goal that will check all the plugins and reports used in your project and display a list of those plugins with newer versions available. Here is an example of the output it produces:

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Building Unnamed - org.codehaus.mojo.versions-maven-plugin.it:parent:pom:2.0
[INFO]    task-segment: [versions:display-plugin-updates]
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] [versions:display-plugin-updates]
[INFO]
[INFO] The following plugin updates are available:
[INFO]   maven-checkstyle-plugin .................................. 2.1 -> 2.2
[INFO]   maven-clean-plugin ....................................... 2.1 -> 2.2
[INFO]   maven-deploy-plugin ...................................... 2.3 -> 2.4
[INFO]   maven-javadoc-plugin ..................................... 2.4 -> 2.5
[INFO]   maven-site-plugin .......................... 2.0-beta-6 -> 2.0-beta-7
[INFO]
[WARNING] The following plugins do not have their version specified:
[WARNING]   maven-compiler-plugin ..................... (from super-pom) 2.0.2
[WARNING]   maven-deploy-plugin ......................... (from super-pom) 2.3
[WARNING]   maven-install-plugin ........................ (from super-pom) 2.2
[WARNING]   maven-javadoc-plugin ........................ (from super-pom) 2.4
[WARNING]   maven-site-plugin .................... (from super-pom) 2.0-beta-6
[WARNING]   org.codehaus.mojo:build-helper-maven-plugin .................. 1.2
[INFO]
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESSFUL
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: < 1 second
[INFO] Finished at: Mon Sep 01 15:55:18 IST 2008
[INFO] Final Memory: 6M/104M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

It can also be used to produce a report (part of the site) that you could for example generate each night.

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I was not necessarily looking for updates on the libraries used in my project, but was interested in obtaining regular updates on certain products which I am interested in.

For this, the best option might be to subscribe to the relevant mailing lists (by mail or RSS) and to track announcements.