Get Maven artifact version at runtime

Question

You should not need to access Maven-specific files to get the version information of any given library/class.

You can simply use getClass().getPackage().getImplementationVersion() to get the version information that is stored in a .jar-files MANIFEST.MF. Luckily Maven is smart enough Unfortunately Maven does not write the correct information to the manifest as well by default!

Instead one has to modify the <archive> configuration element of the maven-jar-plugin to set addDefaultImplementationEntries and addDefaultSpecificationEntries to true, like this:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-jar-plugin</artifactId>
    <configuration>
        <archive>                   
            <manifest>
                <addDefaultImplementationEntries>true</addDefaultImplementationEntries>
                <addDefaultSpecificationEntries>true</addDefaultSpecificationEntries>
            </manifest>
        </archive>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

Ideally this configuration should be put into the company pom or another base-pom.

Detailed documentation of the <archive> element can be found in the Maven Archive documentation.

To follow up the answer above, for a .war artifact, I found I had to apply the equivalent configuration to maven-war-plugin, rather than maven-jar-plugin:

<plugin>
    <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.1</version>
    <configuration>
        <archive>                   
            <manifest>
                <addDefaultImplementationEntries>true</addDefaultImplementationEntries>
                <addDefaultSpecificationEntries>true</addDefaultSpecificationEntries>
            </manifest>
        </archive>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

This added the version information to MANIFEST.MF in the project's .jar (included in WEB-INF/lib of the .war)

Here's a method for getting the version from the pom.properties, falling back to getting it from the manifest

public synchronized String getVersion() {
    String version = null;

    // try to load from maven properties first
    try {
        Properties p = new Properties();
        InputStream is = getClass().getResourceAsStream("/META-INF/maven/com.my.group/my-artefact/pom.properties");
        if (is != null) {
            p.load(is);
            version = p.getProperty("version", "");
        }
    } catch (Exception e) {
        // ignore
    }

    // fallback to using Java API
    if (version == null) {
        Package aPackage = getClass().getPackage();
        if (aPackage != null) {
            version = aPackage.getImplementationVersion();
            if (version == null) {
                version = aPackage.getSpecificationVersion();
            }
        }
    }

    if (version == null) {
        // we could not compute the version so use a blank
        version = "";
    }

    return version;
} 

I am using maven-assembly-plugin for my maven packaging. The usage of Apache Maven Archiver in Joachim Sauer's answer could also work:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-assembly-plugin</artifactId>
    <configuration>
        <descriptorRefs>
            <descriptorRef>jar-with-dependencies</descriptorRef>
        </descriptorRefs>
        <archive>
            <manifest>
                <addDefaultImplementationEntries>true</addDefaultImplementationEntries>
                <addDefaultSpecificationEntries>true</addDefaultSpecificationEntries>
            </manifest>
        </archive>
    </configuration>
    <executions>
        <execution .../>
    </executions>
</plugin>

Because archiever is one of maven shared components, it could be used by multiple maven building plugins, which could also have conflict if two or more plugins introduced, including archive configuration inside.

I spent some time on the two main approaches here and they didn't work-out for me. I am using Netbeans for the builds, may be there's more going on there. I had some errors and warnings from Maven 3 with some constructs, but I think those were easy to correct. No biggie.

I did find an answer that looks maintainable and simple to implement in this article on DZone:

• Stamping Version Number and Build Time in a Properties File with Maven

I already have a resources/config sub-folder, and I named my file: app.properties, to better reflect the kind of stuff we may keep there (like a support URL, etc.).

The only caveat is that Netbeans gives a warning that the IDE needs filtering off. Not sure where/how. It has no effect at this point. Perhaps there's a work around for that if I need to cross that bridge. Best of luck.

To get this running in Eclipse, as well as in a Maven build, you should add the addDefaultImplementationEntries and addDefaultSpecificationEntries pom entries as described in other replies, then use the following code:

public synchronized static final String getVersion() {
    // Try to get version number from pom.xml (available in Eclipse)
    try {
        String className = getClass().getName();
        String classfileName = "/" + className.replace('.', '/') + ".class";
        URL classfileResource = getClass().getResource(classfileName);
        if (classfileResource != null) {
            Path absolutePackagePath = Paths.get(classfileResource.toURI())
                    .getParent();
            int packagePathSegments = className.length()
                    - className.replace(".", "").length();
            // Remove package segments from path, plus two more levels
            // for "target/classes", which is the standard location for
            // classes in Eclipse.
            Path path = absolutePackagePath;
            for (int i = 0, segmentsToRemove = packagePathSegments + 2;
                    i < segmentsToRemove; i++) {
                path = path.getParent();
            }
            Path pom = path.resolve("pom.xml");
            try (InputStream is = Files.newInputStream(pom)) {
                Document doc = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance()
                        .newDocumentBuilder().parse(is);
                doc.getDocumentElement().normalize();
                String version = (String) XPathFactory.newInstance()
                        .newXPath().compile("/project/version")
                        .evaluate(doc, XPathConstants.STRING);
                if (version != null) {
                    version = version.trim();
                    if (!version.isEmpty()) {
                        return version;
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    } catch (Exception e) {
        // Ignore
    }

    // Try to get version number from maven properties in jar's META-INF
    try (InputStream is = getClass()
        .getResourceAsStream("/META-INF/maven/" + MAVEN_PACKAGE + "/"
                + MAVEN_ARTIFACT + "/pom.properties")) {
        if (is != null) {
            Properties p = new Properties();
            p.load(is);
            String version = p.getProperty("version", "").trim();
            if (!version.isEmpty()) {
                return version;
            }
        }
    } catch (Exception e) {
        // Ignore
    }

    // Fallback to using Java API to get version from MANIFEST.MF
    String version = null;
    Package pkg = getClass().getPackage();
    if (pkg != null) {
        version = pkg.getImplementationVersion();
        if (version == null) {
            version = pkg.getSpecificationVersion();
        }
    }
    version = version == null ? "" : version.trim();
    return version.isEmpty() ? "unknown" : version;
}

If your Java build puts target classes somewhere other than "target/classes", then you may need to adjust the value of segmentsToRemove.