CODEWITHSUNDEEP
maven-2jar
Gonzalo Garcia Lasurtegui
Gonzalo Garcia Lasurtegui

Reputation: 4941

Delivering a single jar with a Maven project

I want to deliver a single .jar file to my clients, but my project is currently built with Maven, and I have several modules that generate a single .jar each.

I know nesting different .jar files is not a great idea, so I am not sure how can I achieve this.

Any ideas?

Upvotes: 7

Views: 7056

Answers (4)

sam
sam

Reputation: 11

You can try Maven Shade plugin too. http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-shade-plugin/

General instructions on how to use the Shade Plugin can be found on the usage page. Some more specific use cases are described in the examples given below. Last but not least, users occasionally contribute additional examples, tips or errata to the plugin's wiki page.

In case you still have questions regarding the plugin's usage, please feel free to contact the user mailing list. The posts to the mailing list are archived and could already contain the answer to your question as part of an older thread. Hence, it is also worth browsing/searching the mail archive.

If you feel like the plugin is missing a feature or has a defect, you can fill a feature request or bug report in our issue tracker. When creating a new issue, please provide a comprehensive description of your concern. Especially for fixing bugs it is crucial that the developers can reproduce your problem. For this reason, entire debug logs, POMs or most preferably little demo projects attached to the issue are very much appreciated. Of course, patches are welcome, too. Contributors can check out the project from our source repository and will find supplementary information in the guide to helping with Maven.

Upvotes: 1

whaley
whaley

Reputation: 16265

First of all, ask yourself if you have a really good reason for packaging your application and all of its dependencies in to a single jar. I haven't found a very many good reason for this at all (with most reasons being related to organizational policy foolishness or just plain ignorance). The way to go is to keep libraries in their own jars and supplying a .zip/.tar.gz containing all of your libraries and your application with either

  1. An executable .jar with the classpath setup appropriately in your MANFIEST.MF file
  2. a .bat/.sh script that invokes java and builds an appropriate classpath based on your deps

Conversely, use JNLP (better known as Java Web Start).

If you really want to have maven bundle all of your dependencies and your application under a single jar, what you want to use is the "jar-with-dependencies" predefined assembly. The maven assembly plugin usage page also shows how you might this up as well.

Upvotes: 8

Pascal Thivent
Pascal Thivent

Reputation: 570545

If you really want to go this direction, there are several ways to do that:

Depending on your exact requirements and constraints, you might prefer one or the other.

Upvotes: 13

RonU
RonU

Reputation: 5795

Actually, nesting .jar files is not possible. A jar can't have other jars in it.

.war and .ear files can contain jars, and that's a good solution if you're delivering a J2EE application.

If your app is just J2SE, however, I recommend looking at the Maven Assembly plugin. As the name implies, it allows you to create a single binary distribution of your build.

Upvotes: 0

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