Question

I am developing a Java maven project with Eclipse and want to export a jar that includes all referenced libraries. These referenced libraries fall into one of these two categories:

1. They are explicit (or implicit) dependencies in the pom.xml

2. I have some libraries not available as maven artifacts and have put them in /lib (and added them to the build path in Eclipse)

There’s the maven-assembly-plugin, which works fine for 1). However, I’m unable to find a maven plugin that also includes non-maven-dependencies, e.g. "all jars in /lib".

Then there’s the Eclipse FatJar plugin, which sort of works, but hasn’t been updated since 2009, so it seems unmaintained. Also I prefer an export method that I can directly specify in the pom.xml.

Can anyone point me to a maven plugin or the like to export all referenced libraries, including those from case 2) ? That only needs to involve putting them in the jar and referencing them in the manifest’s classpath.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I think the best way to handle this is to include your custom libs into a local maven repository. Now you can inlcude your libraries as maven dependencies and you can export all your dependencies specified in your pom with the maven-assembly-plugin.

Here is a tutorial, how to put your libs into a local repository in maven to use it in your pom. http://www.mkyong.com/maven/how-to-include-library-manully-into-maven-local-repository/

And in your pom.xml:

<!-- setup jar manifest to executable with dependencies -->
<plugin>
  <artifactId>maven-assembly-plugin</artifactId>
  <configuration>
    <descriptorRefs>
      <descriptorRef>jar-with-dependencies</descriptorRef>
    </descriptorRefs>
    <archive>
      <manifest>
        <mainClass>your.main.class</mainClass>
      </manifest>
    </archive>
  </configuration>
  <executions>
    <execution>
      <phase>package</phase>
      <goals>
       <goal>single</goal>
      </goals>  
    </execution>
  </executions>
</plugin>