Limiting a transitive dependency to runtime scope in Maven

Question

I've got 2 projects using Maven. The first one is a library containing utility classes and methods. The second project is an actual application that has the library as a dependency. My library uses internally a third-party library.

So these are the dependencies:

• My library: depends on the third-party library
• My application: depends on my library

However, I don't want the third-party library classes to be available at compile time in my application. This is because the application is supported by a large team and I want to prevent people from accidentally using methods from the third-party library in the application given that some class names and some method names are similar between the two. Of course the third-par ty library will have to be available in my application at runtime.

If the scope for all my dependencies was compile, it wouldn't achieve my goal. Is there a way to achieve this in Maven 3?

Answer 1

Very good question and unfortunately you can't do this using Maven 3, or 2, or any other version, because of its fundamental design. What you're asking about is actually a desired and ideal behaviour since in fact any artifact's compile dependencies should be transitive with runtime scope. However, design like this leads to some problems. As you can read at Maven's Introduction to the Dependency Mechanism about compile scope:

It is intended that [transitive dependencies of a compile dependency which are themselves compile dependencies should be considered] runtime scope instead, so that all compile dependencies must be explicitly listed - however, there is the case where the library you depend on extends a class from another library, forcing you to have available at compile time. For this reason, compile time dependencies remain as compile scope even when they are transitive.

So, as you see, what you require is actually the proper design of this behaviour which is unfortunately impossible to implement.

Answer 2

Nothing has changed during the last three years, so Michal's answer is still correct: There is no way to limit transitive visibility in Maven.

However, you should consider redesigning your library to split it in an api-artifact that is necessary as compile time dependency and which itself does not depend on the third party library and an implementation artifact which is only needed as runtime-dependency and which depends on the third party library.