Adding a set of dependencies in maven

Question

I have read how to take a jar file that I have and add it to the dependency system in maven in this link

But what i want is, I have a set of 30 to 40 jar files that I have to add to the dependency system. Do i need to add all the jar files by using the

1. mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=com.stackoverflow... -DartifactId=yourartifactid... -Dversion=1.0 -Dpackaging=jar -Dfile=/path/to/jarfile,

followed by,

2.

<dependencies>
        ...
        <dependency>
                <groupId>com.stackoverflow...</groupId>
                <artifactId>artifactId...</artifactId>
                <version>1.0</version>
        </dependency>
        ...
</dependencies>

or is there a simple way by which i can wrap up all the dependent jar files into one maven project using mvn:install, to which my main project can be made dependent?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The first answer in this link really solved my doubt..

"Projects should explicitly list all their dependencies and not rely on inheriting them (IMHO). It means you have to declare your logger a few times but it will save you pain later. (You can of course use a separate POM project to group together dependencies that are related and hence usually specified together, like the hibernate example in your link). If you want to centralize versions of dependencies, you can put a dependencyManagement section in the parent POM, which means you still declare the dependency in the child project, but the version comes from the parent, thus ensuring consistency. Children that don't declare the dependency don't end up with it at all."

So the practice should be to create separate POM (Child) project for all the dependencies, and if we want, we can wrap them up using aggregation to a Parent-POM which can be referred singly in our project. But we have to however create a child project separately for each dependent JAR. Bit time taking process, but seems to be the only answer.

Answer 2

If most of the 30-40 jar files you are referring to are standard open source libraries, then you would not need to install them to your local repository manually. It is also possible that many of them are transitive, i.e. one dependency in turn pulling in another. In this case, you would need to only add as dependency the primary dependencies. This will in turn pull in the transitive ones.

If most of the dependencies are proprietary and you manage them yourself, then chances are you have them in your source code management system in some specific folder, say lib. If so, you can skip the install step and just specify dependencies using <system> scope (refer here).

You could define a single maven project (as pom type) to specify all the dependencies and have your main project dependant on it, if that simplifies things.