Can I add jars to maven 2 build classpath without installing them?

Question

Maven2 is driving me crazy during the experimentation/quick and dirty mock-up phase of development.

I have a pom.xml file that defines the dependencies for the web-app framework I want to use, and I can quickly generate starter projects from that file. However, sometimes I want to link to a 3rd party library that doesn't already have a pom.xml file defined, so rather than create the pom.xml file for the 3rd party lib by hand and install it, and add the dependency to my pom.xml, I would just like to tell maven: "In addition to my defined dependencies, include any jars that are in /lib too."

It seems like this ought to be simple, but if it is, I am missing something.

Any pointers on how to do this are greatly appreciated. Short of that, if there is a simple way to point maven to a /lib directory and easily create a pom.xml with all the enclosed jars mapped to a single dependency which I could then name/install and link to in one fell swoop would also suffice.

Thanks!

Answer 1

This doesn't answer how to add them to your POM, and may be a no brainer, but would just adding the lib dir to your classpath work? I know that is what I do when I need an external jar that I don't want to add to my Maven repos.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

set scope == system and just make up a groupId, artifactId, and version

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.swinglabs</groupId>
    <artifactId>swingx</artifactId>
    <version>0.9.2</version>
    <scope>system</scope>
    <systemPath>path to ... swingx-0.9.3.jar</systemPath>
</dependency>

Answer 3

Note: When using the System scope (as mentioned on this page), Maven needs absolute paths.

If your jars are under your project's root, you'll want to prefix your systemPath values with ${basedir}.

Answer 4

http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-install-plugin/usage.html

Has command line usage to install a jar into the local repository, POM is optional but you will have to specify the GroupId, ArtifactId, Version and Packaging (all the POM stuff).

Answer 5

You really ought to get a framework in place via a repository and identifying your dependencies up front. Using the system scope is a common mistake people use, because they "don't care about the dependency management." The trouble is that doing this you end up with a perverted maven build that will not show maven in a normal condition. You would be better off following an approach like this.

Answer 6

I would like to keep set of property files outside jar being generated through maven. How do i tell maven to add the directory containing these property files to its classpath so that Spring can be able to pick it up. I googled a lot, but couldn't find a solution yet (i don't want to add them as dependency).

Answer 7

I would like to keep set of property files outside jar being generated through maven. How do i tell maven to add the directory containing these property files to its classpath so that Spring can be able to pick it up. I googled a lot, but couldn't find a solution yet (i don't want to add them as dependency).

I have the same problem, have you found a solution? thx

Answer 8

A strange solution I found:

using Eclipse

• create simple (non-maven) java project
• add a Main class
• add all the jars to the classpath
• export Runnable JAR (it's important, because no other way here to do it)
• select Extract required libraries into generated JAR
• decide the licence issues
• tadammm...install the generated jar to your m2repo
• add this single dependency to your other projects.

cheers, Balint

Answer 9

Even though it does not exactly fit to your problem, I'll drop this here. My requirements were:

1. Jars that can not be found in an online maven repository should be in the SVN.
2. If one developer adds another library, the other developers should not be bothered with manually installing them.
3. The IDE (NetBeans in my case) should be able find the sources and javadocs to provide autocompletion and help.

Let's talk about (3) first: Just having the jars in a folder and somehow merging them into the final jar will not work for here, since the IDE will not understand this. This means all libraries have to be installed properly. However, I dont want to have everyone installing it using "mvn install-file".

In my project I needed metawidget. Here we go:

1. Create a new maven project (name it "shared-libs" or something like that).
2. Download metawidget and extract the zip into src/main/lib.
3. The folder doc/api contains the javadocs. Create a zip of the content (doc/api/api.zip).
4. Modify the pom like this http://pastebin.com/GscFtMUP
5. Build the project and the library will be installed.
6. Add the library as a dependency to your project, or (if you added the dependency in the shared-libs project) add shared-libs as dependency to get all libraries at once.

Every time you have a new library, just add a new execution and tell everyone to build the project again (you can improve this process with project hierachies).