Using Maven just for dependency management

For quite some time now I've had the intention to learn how to use Maven and especially how to use it to manage the dependencies for my projects without having to do anything special. I share with you what is necessary to achieve the same thing in your own projects.

First we need to have Maven installed.  You can download Maven from Here so you can execute it from the console or you can install the plugin for eclipse, just search for a plugin called "m2e - Maven Integration for Eclipse" in eclipse and install it.

The next thing to do is to replace the commented code in the "pom.xml" by following the steps below:

• The grouping.id, can be for example the package name of the project in which you use the pom for example com.domain.project.
• The artifact-id, might be something like domain-project (for domain-project.jar) or project (for project.jar) without taking into account the version.  So for commons-logging-1.1.1.jar for example the artifact id would be commons-logging.
• Replace the string "libs" inside <libraries.folder>libs</libraries.folder> with the path in which you want the jars to be stored. For a website project developed using Eclipse it could be for example something like "WebContent/WEB-INF/lib".
• Locate the piece of xml below and add the dependencies you want to be automatically managed by Maven.  In this Url you can search for the dependencies you wish to add.

<!-- Your dependencies -->
<!--dependency>
<groupId>group id</groupId>
<artifactId>artifact id</artifactId>
<version>the version number!</version>
</dependency-->

• And finally add the repositories you need, generally you do not need to configure any additional repositories, however, there are times in which the jar that we are looking for is not in a general repository so we might get a problem that says "Could not resolve dependencies for project" and "Could not find artifact", in this case we must find out which is the repository where the jar is located and then add the repositories where the following piece of xml is located.

<!-- Your repositories -->
<!--repository>
<id>Repo ID</id>
<name>Repo Name</name>
<url>http://repourl</url>
</repository-->

The file “pom.xml” is designed so that nothing else is necessary to be added in order to run it, just type “mvn” from within the path where the “pom.xml” is located and then press enter or from within Eclipse right click the pom, “Run As”, “Maven Build” and then clicking the “Run” button will start the execution.  At this point Maven will create a folder, if it doesn't exist already, and it will download all the jars that you added and their respective dependencies.

Here is the complete code:

Well, I hope this post has been helpful.