How to create a Maven Artifact, from lonely *.jar files?

Question

Hey,

I'm using Eclipse to manage my SVN repository, and I have a few projects that depend on the same Jar files, I would like to create a maven artifact of these Jars (if possible using Eclipse) and commit that artifact into my SVN repository for further use.
How can I achieve that?

Thanks,
Adam.

Answer 1

Create an Eclipse project which contains all the JARs and an ANT build.xml which calls mvn file:install for each JAR to install then in your local Maven repository (see the docs for options of mvn file:install).

That way, you can use these JARs like any other Maven dependency after running the build.xml once.

[EDIT] A sample target would look like this:

<target name="maven-file-install">
  <exec executable="mvn"> <!-- Make sure mvn is in the PATH -->
    <arg value="file:install"/>
    <arg value="-Dfile=your-artifact-1.0.jar"/>
    ... all the other arguments of file:install ...
  </exec>
</target>

Answer 2

I suggest using a file based repository:

• Create a module containing a file based repository
• Install the jars in this file based repository
• Commit the module to SVN

Detailed steps are provided in this previous answer.

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