Maven package in-project repository dependencies inside jar

Question

I am using the in-project repository dependency solution to include a third party jar as a dependency in my Maven project. I'm following the instructions on this blog for that.

Now, I want that when I package my Maven project into a jar, the jar that is created should have a lib folder with the third party jar in it. However, I do NOT want the other dependencies to be packaged in the jar. (I don't want a fat jar with ALL dependencies packaged inside it, I just want a jar with the one third party dependency jar packaged inside it).

I have been trying to play around with the maven-dependency-plugin and the maven-jar-plugin, but I've not been able to achieve what I want.

Can someone please help me out?

Answer 1

You can use maven-dependency-plugin (look here) as shown below, this plugin will provide lots of options to include jars which ArtifactId (i.e., <includeArtifactIds>) or groupId (<includeGroupIds>), etc...

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
  <artifactId>maven-dependency-plugin</artifactId>
      <executions>
         <execution>
             <id>copy-dependencies</id>
             <phase>prepare-package</phase>
              <goals>
                  <goal>copy-dependencies</goal>
              </goals>
              <configuration>
             <outputDirectory>${project.build.directory}/
                             classes/lib</outputDirectory>
                <overWriteReleases>false</overWriteReleases>
                <overWriteSnapshots>false</overWriteSnapshots>
                <overWriteIfNewer>true</overWriteIfNewer>
                <includeArtifactIds>YOUR_THIRDPARTY_JAR_NAME</includeArtifactIds>
                </configuration>
            </execution>
        </executions>
    </plugin>

So, the above code will add YOUR_THIRDPARTY_JAR_NAME.jar into your final .jar file's lib folder.