Maven copy only specific dependencies

Question

I'm developping an OSGI email client with Maven following component-based software engineering. I must make sure that the dependencies between all my components are resolved inside of the OSGI container, so I cannot copy the dependencies inside the generated JARs, otherwise there would be no point using OSGI. But there is one dependency I really have to copy inside of the JAR, it's javax.mail, because I cannot find any OSGI-compatible bundle that does emailing.

To do that, I have seen this page: https://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-dependency-plugin/examples/copying-artifacts.html

So I edited my pom.xml:

<project>
    ...
    <build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin> <!-- to edit the MANIFEST.MF, required for OSGI -->
                <groupId>org.apache.felix</groupId>
                <artifactId>maven-bundle-plugin</artifactId>
                <version>4.2.1</version>
                <extensions>true</extensions>
                <configuration>
                    <instructions>
                        <Class-Path>lib/</Class-Path>
                        ... OSGI instructions ...
                    </instructions>
                </configuration>
            </plugin>
            <plugin> <!-- to copy the dependencies -->
                <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
                <artifactId>maven-dependency-plugin</artifactId>
                <version>3.1.1</version>
                <executions>
                    <execution>
                        <phase>install</phase>
                        <goals>
                            <goal>copy-dependencies</goal>
                        </goals>
                        <configuration>
                            <artifactItems>
                                <artifactItem>
                                    <groupId>com.sun.mail</groupId>
                                    <artifactId>javax.mail</artifactId>
                                    <version>1.6.2</version>
                                    <outputDirectory>${project.build.directory}/lib</outputDirectory>
                                </artifactItem>
                            </artifactItems>
                        </configuration>
                    </execution>
                </executions>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>
    ...
</project>

But the <artifactItems> tag doesn't seem to work. When I mvn install, it copies ALL the dependencies into a dependency/ folder and not a lib/ folder. How can I do to copy only the javax.mail JAR into a folder named lib/?

Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

The maven-bundle-plugin allows to embed dependencies: https://felix.apache.org/documentation/subprojects/apache-felix-maven-bundle-plugin-bnd.html

<Embed-Dependency>javax.mail|javax.mail-api</Embed-Dependency>