Question

I am doing a project that has dependencies on some classes from the mahout and hadoop core jars. I was using javac with the classpath option to include them before, but someone suggested to me that I should use maven to build my project instead. However, I am not sure how to add the dependencies to these jar files which are located in my /usr/local directory.

Answer 1

Have a look at the maven documentation, especially the part on dependency management. If you want to use Maven you should get to know the basics (one of which is dependency management).

Basially you define your project’s dependencies in the <dependencies> section of your pom. Look up maven central (the most common online repository) for the dependencies you want or search for other online repositories that might contain them.

If you can’t find them, add the dependencies you want anyways (think of a sensible group id, artifact id and version) and try to compile. Maven will complain about the dependencies missing and provide a basic command to put those dependencies into the local repository. Copy those commands and fill in the appropriate path to the jar file and maven will deploy that dependency in your local repository.

Note that you should first look for the dependencies in an online repository since otherwise you’d have to manually deploy each new version in your local repo.