I am developing an application that depends on a number of legacy JAR files and I want the project to build straight out of version control without other users having to install these JARs in their local repository. I cannot add them to the corporate repository so I have created a repository that is local to this project and I have added these JARs to that repository using maven-install-plugin:install-file and setup the repository entry in the POM file so it knows to search the local repository.
This works exactly the way I want…up to a point. The problem is that most of these legacy JAR files have their own set of dependencies. I would like for them to work just like other artifacts that have their own set of dependencies so that maven can resolve everything and include all the necessary files but I can’t find a way to do this with any maven-install-plugin:install-file options (or any other maven commands/plugins). I am pretty new at maven so I am probably just ignorant on this point.
As a work around, I attempted to go into the local repository directory and manually edit the POM file for the artifact to include the dependencies. This didn’t cause any errors but it is also not pulling in those dependencies.
Can someone out there give me a clue?
The
maven-install-plugin:install-filegoal has a pomFile attribute. You can use this to specify a POM file for your legacy jar. You would create a POM file that points to all of the dependencies by artifactId in the<dependencies>section. If you have a remote nexus repository you can use the admin screen for the repository to deploy a jar.