Question

I’ve got a project I’ve made with Maven. I compile a JAR, with “mvn package”, and now I want to run it, preferably without setting some insane classpath, as it depends on Spring and half the internet or something. Is there any way I can run it easily? Something like “mvn run” would be great, or an option to throw in all dependencies into the jar so I can do “java -jar” would also be splendid.

How do you deal with this, and what do you recommend doing? Because exporting a CLASSPATH based on ~/.m2 would probably just be hurtful 😉

Answer 1

Use the Maven Assembly Plugin – it will automatically build your JAR with all included dependencies, and you can set the main class parameter to make the JAR executable.

The documentation can be confusing, so here is an example of what your POM will look like:

<build>
   <plugins>
       <plugin>
           <artifactId>maven-assembly-plugin</artifactId>
           <version>2.1</version>
           <configuration>
               <descriptorRefs>
                   <descriptorRef>jar-with-dependencies</descriptorRef>
               </descriptorRefs>
               <archive>
                   <manifest>
                       <mainClass>package.of.my.MainClass</mainClass>
                       <packageName>package.of.my</packageName>
                   </manifest>
               </archive>
           </configuration>
        </plugin>
   </plugins>
</build>

And then you can run as:

mvn assembly:assembly