How to check pom.xml for updated dependencies

Question

I am fairly new to Maven and pom.xml. Is there a way I can find out which of my dependencies that are outdated, so that I can update version numbers in my pom.xml.

In other languages, for instance, Ruby has the command gem list outdated that gives me a list of dependencies (rubygems) I can update

I am using IntelliJ Idea if that can help.

Answer 1

For the plugin's you can use the maven-dependency plugin to check this..but for other dependencies there does not exist such a plugin...AFAIK

Answer 2

You can do this with the Versions Maven Plugin. Check the following goals:

• versions:display-dependency-updates scans a project's dependencies and produces a report of those dependencies which have newer versions available.
• versions:display-plugin-updates scans a project's plugins and produces a report of those plugins which have newer versions available.

Here is a sample output (taken from the examples):

Checking for new dependency updates

The display-dependency-updates goal will check all the dependencies used in your project and display a list of those dependencies with newer versions available.

Here are some examples of what this looks like:

svn checkout http://svn.codehaus.org/mojo/trunk/mojo/build-helper-maven-plugin build-helper-maven-plugin
cd build-helper-maven-plugin
mvn versions:display-dependency-updates

Which produces the following output:

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Building Build Helper Maven Plugin
[INFO]    task-segment: [versions:display-dependency-updates]
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] [versions:display-dependency-updates]
[INFO]
[INFO] The following dependency updates are available:
[INFO]   org.apache.maven:maven-artifact ........................ 2.0 -> 2.0.9
[INFO]   org.apache.maven:maven-plugin-api ...................... 2.0 -> 2.0.9
[INFO]   org.apache.maven:maven-project ....................... 2.0.2 -> 2.0.9
[INFO]   org.codehaus.plexus:plexus-utils ....................... 1.1 -> 1.5.6
[INFO]
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESSFUL
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 17 seconds
[INFO] Finished at: Fri Aug 15 10:46:03 IST 2008
[INFO] Final Memory: 10M/167M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------