Adding custom libs to maven project

Often times, we deal with library jar’s which are not available on public or internal company repositories. One idea to deal with such a situation is to add those libs into classpath and partly manage using build scripts etc. But that makes the project maintenence very complicated. In this post, lets see few solutions which will come in handy in such scenarios.

System dependency

We can load all those libs into a separate folder under the project’s base directory and then reference it in our project’s POM file as below:

<dependencies>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>com.example</groupId>
    <artifactId>example1</artifactId>
    <version>1.0</version>
    <scope>system</scope>
    <systemPath>${basedir}/lib/example1-1.0.jar</systemPath>
  </dependency>
</dependencies>

Install into Local repository

We can install our lib jar into local maven repository using the followign command,

mvn install:install-file -Dfile=<path-to-file> \
    -DgroupId=<group-id> -DartifactId=<artifact-id> \
    -Dversion=<version> -Dpackaging=<packaging>