How to get Maven dependencies printed to a file in a readable format?

Question

I am working on a big projects with many pom.xml files and I need to specify all the libraries that I use. This means that I need to read pom.xml files recursively and get groupId, artifactId, scope and version. I checked out mvn dependency:tree but I can't find a way to print it to a file in a readable format. I saw appendOutput but I saw no example on how to use it in cmd. I saw some solutions done in Linux but I only have access to Windows XP.

Answer 1

This can (at least now) be done with command line options to the dependency:tree plugin.

Try:

mvn dependency:tree -Doutput=/path/to/file 

Reference: Maven Dependency Plugin Page

You only asked about "readable" format, but you can also pass the -DoutputType parameter with various options. Also note that the version I have installed, I get the following warning:

[WARNING] The parameter output is deprecated. Use outputFile instead.  

So, consider trying it with -DoutputFile=/path/to/file

Also, I was unable to get the -DoutputType paramater to give me anything other than the default text, but didn't have a chance to play around with it. YMMV.

Answer 2

If you have multiple modules under the same repo/project and want the dependencies of all the modules in one file, so as to be able to diff b/w one build and another to see if something changed somewhere, you can do

$project_dir> mvn dependency:tree -DoutputFile=<absolute_path_to_file> -DappendOutput=true 

e.g.

$project_dir> mvn dependency:tree -DoutputFile=`pwd`/mvn_dependency_tree.txt -DappendOutput=true 

See other options available at https://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-dependency-plugin/tree-mojo.html