Incorporate large number of 3rd party jars into maven

Question

I'm working on a project that has a reliance on a significant number of 3rd party jars; these jars contain both proprietary classes and custom/patched versions of existing libraries. I'm trying to figure out how to tie these jars into the maven architecture so as to be CI friendly.

My initial idea was to create an uberjar of all these libraries, and add that one uberjar to the maven repository, however I have not been able to figure out how to take this set of standalone jar files (that are not dependencies) to merge like that. There exists lots of documentation on how to uberjar a project and its dependencies, but not standalone jars.

I feel like i'm missing something basic, or maybe there is a better way. Any recommendations are welcome.

Answer 1

You would be better off to proceed as follows:

1. Set up a repository manager.
2. Write a shell script that runs mvn deploy:deploy-file for each of your jars, generating the GAV with a simple algorithm.
3. treat them like anything else.

To elaborate on Step 2:

G:A:V - my-company-name:name-of-jar:version-based-on-todays-date.