Suppress Maven Dependency Plugin's "Unused declared dependencies found" warnings

Question

The maven-dependency-plugin identifies what it believes to be unused dependencies when you compile by producing warnings at compile time.

[WARNING] Unused declared dependencies found:
[WARNING]    org.foo:bar-api:jar:1.7.5:compile

In some cases this message is a false positive and the dependency is required transitively.

Question: How can I identify in my pom.xml that this is the case?

Answer 1

You should configure in your pom the ignoredDependencies element:

List of dependencies that will be ignored. Any dependency on this list will be excluded from the "declared but unused" and the "used but undeclared" list. The filter syntax is:

[groupId]:[artifactId]:[type]:[version]

where each pattern segment is optional and supports full and partial * wildcards. An empty pattern segment is treated as an implicit wildcard. *

As also specified by the official Exclude dependencies from dependency analysis. A sample configuration would be:

<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <artifactId>maven-dependency-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>2.10</version>
            <executions>
                <execution>
                    <id>analyze-dep</id>
                    <goals>
                        <goal>analyze-only</goal>
                    </goals>
                    <configuration>
                        <ignoredDependencies>
                            <ignoredDependency>org.foo:bar-api:jar:1.7.5</ignoredDependency>
                        </ignoredDependencies>
                    </configuration>
                </execution>
            </executions>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>