Question

I’m trying to build a single .jar file from a Maven project which includes every necessary dependency. Therefore the .jar should run on a computer with missing libraries.

The in my pom.xml:

   <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>junit</groupId>
      <artifactId>junit</artifactId>
      <version>3.8.1</version>
      <scope>test</scope>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>log4j</groupId>
        <artifactId>log4j</artifactId>
        <version>1.2.15</version>
        <exclusions>
            <exclusion>
                <groupId>com.sun.jmx</groupId>
                <artifactId>jmxri</artifactId>
            </exclusion>
            <exclusion>
                <groupId>com.sun.jdmk</groupId>
                <artifactId>jmxtools</artifactId>
            </exclusion>
            <exclusion>
                <groupId>javax.jms</groupId>
                <artifactId>jms</artifactId>
            </exclusion>
        </exclusions>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.hsqldb</groupId>
        <artifactId>hsqldb</artifactId>
        <version>2.2.4</version>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>

In the part of the pom.xml I use the assembly-plugin:

  <plugin>
        <artifactId>maven-assembly-plugin</artifactId>
        <configuration>
          <descriptors>
            <descriptor>src/assemble/exe.xml</descriptor>
          </descriptors>
          <archive>
            <manifestFile>src/main/resources/META-INF/MANIFEST.MF</manifestFile>
          </archive>
        </configuration>
  </plugin>

The “src/assemble/exe.xml” file:

<assembly>
  <id>exe</id>
  <formats>
    <format>jar</format>
  </formats>
  <includeBaseDirectory>false</includeBaseDirectory>
  <dependencySets>
    <dependencySet>
      <outputDirectory></outputDirectory>
      <outputFileNameMapping></outputFileNameMapping>
      <unpack>true</unpack>
      <scope>runtime</scope>
      <includes>
        <include>log4j:log4j</include>
        <include>hsqldb:hsqldb</include>
      </includes>
    </dependencySet>
  </dependencySets>
  <fileSets>
    <fileSet>
      <directory>target/classes</directory>
      <outputDirectory></outputDirectory>
    </fileSet>
  </fileSets>
</assembly>

The whole build process works flawlessly (using Eclipse and m2e).
I mentioned the following line in the output:

[INFO] Reading assembly descriptor: src/assemble/exe.xml
[WARNING] The following patterns were never triggered in this artifact inclusion filter:
o  'hsqldb:hsqldb' 

Calling the resulting .jar with
java -jar result.jar
the HSQLDB JDBC driver can’t be loaded / was not found. As there is normal (System.out.println) and also log4j output on the console, I suspect that only the hsqldb libraries are missing.

How can they be included in the .jar with Maven assembly-plugin?
(My System: Eclipse Indigo, m2e 1.0.100.20110804, Maven 3.0.2, Java 1.6.0.26)

Answer 1

Note that the artifact name of the HSQLDB JDBC driver would be org.hsqldb:hsqldb and not hsqldb:hsqldb as you wrote in your exe.xml. Fix that!