Combine or merge all jars in one executable jar

Question

Kind of a "simple" question here, but it seems complicated to do such a thing using Eclipse.

I have a "utils" project, in which I have developped "common" code like xml parsers, loggers, maths calculations, debug utilities and such.

This library is based on several other external libs (commons-lang-3.1, colt-1.2.0, jdom-2.0.4) to work, and it's a non-runnable JAR file (ie, there is no main(), just utility code to include in other projects).

What I want to do is, when I create the JAR file of my project, extract all external JARs (common-lang, colt, jdom) in the JAR file, in order to automatically use them on other projects.

The reason is that I don't want to re-include common-lang, colt and jdom on every projects based on my lib, but use the ones packed in my lib JAR file (and it's a way to ensure that I'll be using the same version of those libs in the projects based on my lib, too)

I know how to do that with a runnable JAR file. See for instance : How to create a jar with external libraries included in Eclipse?

But in a non-runnable JAR file :

• all my classes are correcly exported in a correct directory structure based on the packages I created (hopefully ;-)),
• but external JAR files are exported "as-is", so when I import my JAR in another project, those JARs (common-lang, ...) can't be seen, and I have to re-import them.

Is there a simple way to export this JAR file with a directory structure in which all external JARs files are extracted in the generated JAR file, too ?

Regards

Answer 1

Have you seen JarSplice?

JarSplice merge all your jars and native files into one, easy to use executable jar file via an easy to use GUI.