Question

I’ve been trying to use Maven to build a project. The project builds fine on a few computers I tried but on one machine, I’m having a random issue.

Essentially, maven is searching for a dependency that is not included in the pom.xml file or the in the settings.xml file at all.

I have tried mvn dependency:purge-local-repository but still no avail; I’m still stuck at mvn searching for a dependency I have no idea where it’s looking from.

Answer 1

If you run mvn dependency:tree on your project you’ll see where the unwanted dependency is being introduced, you can then exclude the dependency.

This is an example of the output:

[INFO] [dependency:tree]
[INFO] org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-dependency-plugin:maven-plugin:2.0-alpha-5-SNAPSHOT
[INFO] \- org.apache.maven.doxia:doxia-site-renderer:jar:1.0-alpha-8:compile
[INFO]    \- org.codehaus.plexus:plexus-velocity:jar:1.1.3:compile
[INFO]       \- velocity:velocity:jar:1.4:compile

To exclude a dependency, you’d do something like this:

<dependency>
  <groupId>sample.ProjectA</groupId>
  <artifactId>Project-A</artifactId>
  <version>1.0</version>
  <exclusions>
    <exclusion>  <!-- declare the exclusion here -->
      <groupId>sample.ProjectB</groupId>
      <artifactId>Project-B</artifactId>
    </exclusion>
  </exclusions> 
</dependency>

For more details on the dependency plugin see the documentation.

For more details on exclusions, see the guide.

Update: You can also use the m2eclipse plugin to generate a graphical tree of the dependencies or as a graph.
dependency tree screenshot http://www.sonatype.com/books/m2eclipse-book/reference/figs/web/eclipse_pom-editor-depend-tree-locate.png
dependency graph screenshot http://www.sonatype.com/books/m2eclipse-book/reference/figs/web/eclipse_pom-editor-graph.png