How to publish project with non-public dependencies?

Question

I have Oracle JDBC driver at my project (ojdbc8.jar)

    <dependency>
        <groupId>com.oracle</groupId>
        <artifactId>ojdbc8</artifactId>
        <version>12.2.0.1</version>
    </dependency>

It's installed at my local maven repository:

mvn install:install-file -Dfile=C:\Oracle\Client\jdbc\lib\ojdbc8.jar -DgroupId=com.oracle -DartifactId=ojdbc8 -Dversion=12.2.0.1 -Dpackaging=jar

But now I want to distribute my project, for example at GitHub

If someone will download my project he won't have a ojdbc8.jar

So question is - how to publish project with some local or additional dependencies, which aren't at maven public repo?

Answer 1

I've had this problem when working with jars from companies, usually Microsoft and Apple, that would prefer that folks use their language stack instead of Java. I'm not a lawyer, but you probably want to instruct folks who want to compile your code to start with the publicly downloadable jar, instead of pointing them to a maven artifact that you've built.

If there's no public repository then you should describe how to build the dependency in the user's local/corporate repository. Give the URL needed to download the jar and describe the manual steps (the ones you used to build your copy) so that interested parties can follow along. As you've mentioned, maven makes it simple to deploy jars into a repository.