Dear programmers,

There may many chances when you try to add external dependencies in your Maven project. Let's learn this how we can add our own jars or external jars in a project with an example.

There are many Maven plugins available, And one of them is install-file, witch could be use to fix the problem. It creates and adds external jar to a local repository and make available to use in Maven project.

Syntax :

mvn install:install-file -Dfile=<complete-path-to-the-jar> -DgroupId=<group-id> -DartifactId=<artifact-id> -Dversion=<version> -Dpackaging=jar

For example -

mvn install:install-file -Dfile=/home/dinesh/workspace/samples/Prototype/lib/siperian-common.jar -DgroupId=custom -DartifactId=siperian-common -Dversion=0.1 -Dpackaging=jar

If everything goes fine, logs like the following appears on console.

[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[INFO]                                                                         
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Building Prototype 1.0-SNAPSHOT
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] 
[INFO] --- maven-install-plugin:2.3:install-file (default-cli) @ Prototype ---
[INFO] Installing /home/dinesh/workspace/samples/Prototype/lib/siperian-common.jar to /home/dinesh/.m2/repository/custom/siperian-common/0.1/siperian-common-0.1.jar
[INFO] Installing /tmp/mvninstall1764840435348692554.pom to /home/dinesh/.m2/repository/custom/siperian-common/0.1/siperian-common-0.1.pom
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESS
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 0.613s
[INFO] Finished at: Tue Jun 16 12:38:33 IST 2015
[INFO] Final Memory: 6M/148M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now the jar is available in local repository and can be defined as a dependency in your Maven project like -

..
<dependency>
        <groupId>custom</groupId>
        <artifactId>siperian-common</artifactId>
        <version>0.1</version>
</dependency>
..

Thanks, Happy coding.