Command to get paths to jars for ivy-managed dependencies

Is there a way to get the paths to the JAR files for ivy-managed dependencies so that a program can be called from the command line and the JAR files are all correctly included in the class path.

Some thing like (for Linux bash and similar scripts):

java -cp `ivyget.sh ivy.xml`

which could then expand to

java -cp "/path/to/first.jar:/path/to/second.jar"

Is something like this possible?

Solution

Ivy can be used in a standalone fashion, see the documentation. I have included an example below.

While this is a nifty feature I prefer to just use ivy for downloading. If your java program has options (eg -option1 or --option2) then ivy is not capable of properly parsing the command-line.

Example

The following project is used to manage a database schema using liquibase

├── changesets
│   └── scottTiger.xml
├── ivy.xml
├── liquibase.properties
└── liquibase.sh

The project is executed by running the shell script

./liquibase.sh update

liquibase.sh

#!/bin/bash
java -jar $HOME/.ant/lib/ivy.jar \
     -error \
     -ivy ivy.xml \
     -main liquibase.integration.commandline.Main \
     -args $@

ivy.xml

The ivy file pulls in the liquibase and H2 database projects as dependencies

<ivy-module version="2.0">
    <info organisation="com.myspotontheweb" module="demo"/>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency org="org.liquibase" name="liquibase-core" rev="latest.release" conf="default"/>
        <dependency org="com.h2database" name="h2" rev="latest.release" conf="default"/>
    </dependencies>
</ivy-module>

liquibase.properties

Run-time configuration file, where the DB type is set to H2.

url=jdbc:h2:./db/scottTiger
driver=org.h2.Driver
username=user
password=pass
changeLogFile=changesets/scottTiger.xml
logLevel=info