Can I add jars to Maven 2 build classpath without installing them?

Question

Problems of popular approaches

Most of the answers you'll find around the internet will suggest you to either install the dependency to your local repository or specify a "system" scope in the pom and distribute the dependency with the source of your project. But both of these solutions are actually flawed.

Why you shouldn't apply the "Install to Local Repo" approach

When you install a dependency to your local repository it remains there. Your distribution artifact will do fine as long as it has access to this repository. The problem is in most cases this repository will reside on your local machine, so there'll be no way to resolve this dependency on any other machine. Clearly making your artifact depend on a specific machine is not a way to handle things. Otherwise this dependency will have to be locally installed on every machine working with that project which is not any better.

Why you shouldn't apply the "System Scope" approach

The jars you depend on with the "System Scope" approach neither get installed to any repository or attached to your target packages. That's why your distribution package won't have a way to resolve that dependency when used. That I believe was the reason why the use of system scope even got deprecated. Anyway you don't want to rely on a deprecated feature.

The static in-project repository solution

After putting this in your pom:

<repository>
    <id>repo</id>
    <releases>
        <enabled>true</enabled>
        <checksumPolicy>ignore</checksumPolicy>
    </releases>
    <snapshots>
        <enabled>false</enabled>
    </snapshots>
    <url>file://${project.basedir}/repo</url>
</repository>

for each artifact with a group id of form x.y.z Maven will include the following location inside your project dir in its search for artifacts:

repo/
| - x/
|   | - y/
|   |   | - z/
|   |   |   | - ${artifactId}/
|   |   |   |   | - ${version}/
|   |   |   |   |   | - ${artifactId}-${version}.jar

To elaborate more on this you can read this blog post.

Use Maven to install to project repo

Instead of creating this structure by hand I recommend to use a Maven plugin to install your jars as artifacts. So, to install an artifact to an in-project repository under repo folder execute:

mvn install:install-file -DlocalRepositoryPath=repo -DcreateChecksum=true -Dpackaging=jar -Dfile=[your-jar] -DgroupId=[...] -DartifactId=[...] -Dversion=[...]

If you'll choose this approach you'll be able to simplify the repository declaration in pom to:

<repository>
    <id>repo</id>
    <url>file://${project.basedir}/repo</url>
</repository>

A helper script

Since executing installation command for each lib is kinda annoying and definitely error prone, I've created a utility script which automatically installs all the jars from a lib folder to a project repository, while automatically resolving all metadata (groupId, artifactId and etc.) from names of files. The script also prints out the dependencies xml for you to copy-paste in your pom.

Include the dependencies in your target package

When you'll have your in-project repository created you'll have solved a problem of distributing the dependencies of the project with its source, but since then your project's target artifact will depend on non-published jars, so when you'll install it to a repository it will have unresolvable dependencies.

To beat this problem I suggest to include these dependencies in your target package. This you can do with either the Assembly Plugin or better with the OneJar Plugin. The official documentaion on OneJar is easy to grasp.

For throw away code only

set scope == system and just make up a groupId, artifactId, and version

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.swinglabs</groupId>
    <artifactId>swingx</artifactId>
    <version>0.9.2</version>
    <scope>system</scope>
    <systemPath>${project.basedir}/lib/swingx-0.9.3.jar</systemPath>
</dependency>

Note: system dependencies are not copied into resulted jar/war
(see How to include system dependencies in war built using maven)

You may create local repository on your project

For example if you have libs folder in project structure

• In libs folder you should create directory structure like: /groupId/artifactId/version/artifactId-version.jar

• In your pom.xml you should register repository

  <repository>
      <id>ProjectRepo</id>
      <name>ProjectRepo</name>
      <url>file://${project.basedir}/libs</url>
  </repository>
  

• and add dependency as usual

  <dependency>
      <groupId>groupId</groupId>
      <artifactId>artifactId</artifactId>
      <version>version</version>
  </dependency>
  

That is all.

For detailed information: How to add external libraries in Maven

Note: When using the System scope (as mentioned on this page), Maven needs absolute paths.

If your jars are under your project's root, you'll want to prefix your systemPath values with ${basedir}.

This is what I have done, it also works around the package issue and it works with checked out code.

I created a new folder in the project in my case I used repo, but feel free to use src/repo

In my POM I had a dependency that is not in any public maven repositories

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.dovetail</groupId>
    <artifactId>zoslog4j</artifactId>
    <version>1.0.1</version>
    <scope>runtime</scope>
</dependency>

I then created the following directories repo/com/dovetail/zoslog4j/1.0.1 and copied the JAR file into that folder.

I created the following POM file to represent the downloaded file (this step is optional, but it removes a WARNING) and helps the next guy figure out where I got the file to begin with.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
    <groupId>com.dovetail</groupId>
    <artifactId>zoslog4j</artifactId>
    <packaging>jar</packaging>
    <version>1.0.1</version>
    <name>z/OS Log4J Appenders</name>
    <url>http://dovetail.com/downloads/misc/index.html</url>
    <description>Apache Log4j Appender for z/OS Logstreams, files, etc.</description>
</project>

Two optional files I create are the SHA1 checksums for the POM and the JAR to remove the missing checksum warnings.

shasum -b < repo/com/dovetail/zoslog4j/1.0.1/zoslog4j-1.0.1.jar \
          > repo/com/dovetail/zoslog4j/1.0.1/zoslog4j-1.0.1.jar.sha1

shasum -b < repo/com/dovetail/zoslog4j/1.0.1/zoslog4j-1.0.1.pom \
          > repo/com/dovetail/zoslog4j/1.0.1/zoslog4j-1.0.1.pom.sha1

Finally I add the following fragment to my pom.xml that allows me to refer to the local repository

<repositories>
    <repository>
        <id>project</id>
        <url>file:///${basedir}/repo</url>
    </repository>
</repositories>

You really ought to get a framework in place via a repository and identifying your dependencies up front. Using the system scope is a common mistake people use, because they "don't care about the dependency management." The trouble is that doing this you end up with a perverted maven build that will not show maven in a normal condition. You would be better off following an approach like this.

This is how we add or install a local jar

    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.example</groupId>
        <artifactId>iamajar</artifactId>
        <version>1.0</version>
        <scope>system</scope>
        <systemPath>${project.basedir}/lib/iamajar.jar</systemPath>
    </dependency>

i gave some default groupId and artifactId because they are mandatory :)