Is there a way to exclude a Maven dependency globally?

Question

I’m trying to find a “generic” way of excluding a transitive dependency from being included without having to exclude it from all the dependencies that depend on it. For example, if I want to exclude slf4j, I do the following:

  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
    <artifactId>hibernate-jmx</artifactId>
    <version>3.3.2.GA</version>
    <exclusions>
      <exclusion>
        <groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
        <artifactId>slf4j-api</artifactId>
      </exclusion>
    </exclusions>
  </dependency>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
    <artifactId>hibernate-entitymanager</artifactId>
    <version>3.4.0.GA</version>
    <type>jar</type>
    <exclusions>
      <exclusion>
        <groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
        <artifactId>slf4j-api</artifactId>
      </exclusion>
    </exclusions>
  </dependency>

This is partly to clean up the pom file, partly to avoid issues in the future with people adding dependencies that depend on that excluded dependency — and forgetting to exclude it.

Is there a way?

Answer 1

Does this help? http://jlorenzen.blogspot.com/2009/06/maven-global-excludes.html

"Assuming I want to exclude avalon-framework from my WAR, I would add the following to my projects POM with a scope of provided. This works across all transitive dependencies and allows you to specify it once.

<dependencies>
  <dependency>
      <artifactId>avalon-framework</artifactId>
      <groupId>avalon-framework</groupId>
      <version>4.1.3</version>
      <scope>provided</scope>
  </dependency>
</dependencies>

This even works when specifying it in the parent POM, which would prevent projects from having to declare this in all child POMs."