Utility for downloading artifacts from maven repo without mvn/poms

Question

Is there a maven client that isn't mvn (the binary included with the maven distribution) I could use to pull down an artifact from a maven repository without using a pom? I'd like to use a maven repository as the repo for our ops team to pick up builds (including snapshots of builds) but I don't want them to have to mess around with writing poms and declaring dependencies in them. Ideally, I'm looking for just a cli client that I could just pass in a repo url and coordinates and download a given artifact. Does such a thing exist or am I better off writing a one-off script for this?

Answer 1

Use the maven embedder. More to the point, use the functionality inside the maven embedder for resolving and downloading jars. Although if you're trying to just write a simple CLI, the repository structure isn't complex and you could easily write a script that takes a maven repo url, artifact ID, group ID and version to generate the full URL to the jar.

Answer 2

Use Nexus. It provides a web interface that other teams can use to download artifacts. http://nexus.sonatype.org/

Answer 3

Well technically the repository is accessed over HTTP, so given the repository location, artifact and coordinates, it should just be possible to give your ops team a URL to the artifact that they can hit in any browser.

Answer 4

Think about Pax URL which lets you use plain URLs to reference maven artifacts like so:

mvn:groupId/artifactId/version

See PAX URL Website for more info (MVN Protocol Handler).

Toni

Answer 5

I see 3 easy options:

1. Just send them a link pointing on your artifact in your repository and have them use their browser.
2. Install and use wget (wget http://path/to/artifact.extension).
3. Install and use mvn dependency:get (requires mvn but doesn't require a pom.xml, see this answer for more details).

Answer 6

I believe this is the api whaley is referring to

http://nexus.sonatype.org/nexus-faq.html#25