Maven: How to find artifacts which depend on another artifact

Question

Let us say, ArtifactA depends on ArtifactB and ArtifactC also depends on ArtifactB

I understand that "mvn dependency plugin" can help list the dependencies of a project/artifact.

But how about the reverse? If I want to find the list of projects/artifacts which depend on a given artifact? From the above example, given ArtifactB, I would like to get ArtifactA and ArtifactC

How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

Maven can only operate on the current project, so it can only detect dependencies between from the current project (or sub-modules) to other projects (including sub-modules of the current project).

So what you can do is search for specific submodules depending on other submodules:

                      mycompany:parent
                    /                  \
         mycompany:child1       mycompany:child2
            /                 /                  \
  mycompany:grandchild1   mycompany:grandchild2   mycompany:grandchild3

This is how you can find all subprojects that have dependencies to grandchild3:

mvn validate -pl child2/grandchild3 -amd

This will run the validate phase on all projects within the current project that depend on grandchild3.