dependencyManagement and scope

Question

I usually put a <dependencyManagement> section in parent-project/pom.xml. This <dependencyManagement> section contains declaration and version for all dependencies of my children modules like this (i.e. without the <scope> element):

<dependencyManagement>   <dependencies>     <dependency>       <groupId>junit</groupId>       <artifactId>junit</artifactId>       <version>4.10</version>     </dependency>   </dependencies>  </dependencyManagement> 

In all children modules (i.e. moduleX/pom.xml), I have:

  <dependencies>     <dependency>      <groupId>junit</groupId>      <artifactId>junit</artifactId>      <scope>test</scope>     </dependency>   </dependencies>  

Obviously, in this example I'm repeating the <scope>test</scope> multiple times for the same dependency (once in every child module needing junit).

My question is:
What are the best practices regarding <scope> declaration?
Is it better to put it in the <dependencyManagement>?
Or is it better to put it in the <dependencies> section of the child module (like in this post)? And why?
Is there any definitive answer to this question?

Answer 1

A little late to the party, but I'll add my two cents.

I recently ran into a very difficult to debug issue.
I have a parent pom for managing dependencies across multiple projects. I had it set with all the dependencies common amongst them and included groupId, artifactId, version and the most common scope.
My thinking would be that I would not have to include scope in the actual dependency section in each project if it fell in line with that most common scope.
The problem occurred when some of those dependencies showed up as transitive dependencies. For example, if:

• A depends on B at compile scope.
• B depends on C at compile scope.
• C is set to provided in dependencyManagement of parent.

Then A's transitive dependency on C is determined to be provided. I'm not really sure if that makes sense or not, but it certainly is confusing.

Anyway, save yourself the hassle, and leave scope out of your dependencyManagement.

Answer 2

dependencyManagement is just here to define dependencies version for all project submodules, the only pertinent scope in this section is import for BOMs.

Scope must be defined in dependencies section.

(For a given dependency it determines the usage context. It allows to include the dependency only when it is required for execution. For example an ear will not be packaged with Java-ee dependencies (scope provided) as it will find them on the target server.)

[edit]

The first statement has an exception, the scope provided in dependencyManagement section will override defined scope in dependencies sections. see DependencyManagement to force scope