Maven: add a dependency to a jar by relative path

Question

I have a proprietary jar that I want to add to my pom as a dependency.

But I don't want to add it to a repository. The reason is that I want my usual maven commands such as mvn compile, etc, to work out of the box. (Without demanding from the developers a to add it to some repository by themselves).

I want the jar to be in a 3rdparty lib in source control, and link to it by relative path from the pom.xml file.

Can this be done? How?

Answer 1

I want the jar to be in a 3rdparty lib in source control, and link to it by relative path from the pom.xml file.

If you really want this (understand, if you can't use a corporate repository), then my advice would be to use a "file repository" local to the project and to not use a system scoped dependency. The system scoped should be avoided, such dependencies don't work well in many situation (e.g. in assembly), they cause more troubles than benefits.

So, instead, declare a repository local to the project:

<repositories>
  <repository>
    <id>my-local-repo</id>
    <url>file://${project.basedir}/my-repo</url>
  </repository>
</repositories>

Install your third party lib in there using install:install-file with the localRepositoryPath parameter:

mvn install:install-file -Dfile=<path-to-file> -DgroupId=<myGroup> \ 
                         -DartifactId=<myArtifactId> -Dversion=<myVersion> \
                         -Dpackaging=<myPackaging> -DlocalRepositoryPath=<path>