Maven: How to package a jar and execute it with dependencies?

[Carl McGraw]

Hello all. I am still new to the world of deployment, packaging, etc.

I am currently operating purely on the CLI, so eclipse/IDEA plugins etc are not a very good option for me. I was hoping more of a pure solution to this problem using only maven.

Preferably I don't want to have my user adding additional things to the class path of the jar to get the code to execute.

So I have the following project:

package com.mycompany.MyProject;

public class MainClass {

    public static void main(String... args) {
         // some code that requires apache commons-cli
    }
}

Then I have the following in my POM.xml

... <dependency> <!-- CLI dependency for parsing command line arguments --> <groupId>commons-cli</groupId> <artifactId>commons-cli</artifactId> <version>1.2</version> </dependency> ... <plugin> <!-- plugin for jar entry point --> <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId> <artifactId>maven-jar-plugin</artifactId> <version>2.4</version> <configuration> <archive> <manifest> <mainClass>com.mycompany.MyProject.MainClass</mainClass> </manifest> </archive> </configuration> </plugin>

Now all that I want is for the user to be able to execute the jar without having to specific the commons-cli library.

Is there a way I can get maven to handle this for me in a simple fashion?

[Carey Brown]

Look up: jar with dependencies

<plugin> <artifactId>maven-assembly-plugin</artifactId> <configuration> <archive> <manifest> <mainClass>Phone</mainClass> </manifest> </archive> <descriptorRefs> <descriptorRef>jar-with-dependencies</descriptorRef> </descriptorRefs> </configuration> <executions> <execution> <id>make-assembly</id> <!-- this is used for inheritance merges --> <phase>package</phase> <!-- bind to the packaging phase --> <goals> <goal>single</goal> </goals> </execution> </executions> </plugin> <plugin> <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId> <executions> <execution> <phase>deploy</phase> <configuration> <tasks> <copy file="/srcjava/MyApp/target/myapp-1.0-jar-with-dependencies.jar" todir="/c:/bin/myapp"/> </tasks> </configuration> <goals> <goal>run</goal> </goals> </execution> </executions> </plugin> </plugins>

[Carl McGraw]

Is this the standard way of overcoming dependencies for deployments? Or do you usually just have the user specify the class path?

[Jesper de Jong]

Carl McGraw wrote:Is this the standard way of overcoming dependencies for deployments? Or do you usually just have the user specify the class path?

No, that would be incredibly cumbersome, real-world projects often have many dependencies.

You can ofcourse simply make a Windows batch file or Linux/OS X shell script to run the application. For example a file named run.bat that would contain the command needed to run the application:

java -cp onelibrary.jar;anotherlibrary.jar;myprogram.jar com.mycompany.myproject.MyMainClass

If you package your program as an executable JAR file then the classpath is specified in the manifest file inside the JAR file, and you can execute it with java -jar myprogram.jar, or even by double-clicking on the JAR file.