Question

I’m trying to convert a project from ant to maven.

The unit tests depend on a third party binary jar, which is not available in any public maven repositories.

How do I make maven handle this situation? I have found two solutions, neither of which are acceptable. First is to use a system dependency; this doesn’t work because a) the dependency should only be for the tests, and b) the dependency is not found by eclipse after generating an eclipse project.

Second is to manually install the dependency in a local repository. This seems to be the recommended way. I don’t want to do this because I want users to be able to build and test with a simple ‘mvn test’. If users have to read a document and copy/paste some shell commands to be able to build and test, then something’s wrong.

I suppose it would be OK if maven itself installed the dependency in the local repository as part of the build – is this possible, and if so, how?

Aled.

Answer 1

First of all my way would be using a repository manager such as nexus and installing this dependency to there.

However there is another solution. You can include this 3rd party jar to your project and with test plugin you can configure to include it in classpath such this:

 <plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.10</version>
    <configuration>
      <additionalClasspathElements>
        <additionalClasspathElement>path/to/additional/resources</additionalClasspathElement>
        <additionalClasspathElement>path/to/additional/jar</additionalClasspathElement>
      </additionalClasspathElements>
    </configuration>
  </plugin>

By the way, I hope that you are aware of that maven is executing surefire plugin in order to run tests by default lifecycle.