CODEWITHSUNDEEP
maven
AbVog
AbVog

Reputation: 1555

How to sort dependencies in a section of a Maven POM file

I need to sort the dependencies in the dependencyManagement section of a POM file that is used as a parent for all projects of my team's portfolio.

The motivation for this is similar to the one described here. In my case, I am just trying to harmonize the versions used throughout our portfolio, in order to avoid the recurring nightmare of version discrepancy: due to copy-paste, some projects use a version of a dependency while others use another version. Another motivation is to have only one place where to manage dependencies. What I am doing is essentially merging dependency specifications from all modules into a giant dependencyManagement section of a parent POM. (EDIT: In the process of looking for an answer to this need of mine, I learned that such a POM is what Maven calls a BOM or "bill of materials".)

However, this task requires that I define the version of each dependency in our parent POM. Doing so, I find myself putting the dependency specification somewhere in what is a growing list of dependencies. It gets more and more difficult to add a dependency and find out whether the dependency is already specified. But that would be much easier if I could sort the dependencies, for instance by group ID.

Is there a plugin that serves that purpose of reordering the dependencies? As a last resort, I will end up writing a small program that will read the XML file from the parent POM and output it sorted.

Upvotes: 5

Views: 10425

Answers (3)

Tenzin Tridhe
Tenzin Tridhe

Reputation: 73

The easiest way to sort your dependencies is to use the sortpom maven plugin. It is very easy to use. Just go to your project directory, open terminal and run the following command:

mvn com.github.ekryd.sortpom:sortpom-maven-plugin:sort -Dsort.keepBlankLines -Dsort.predefinedSortOrder=custom_1

To find more about the project, check their github repo: https://github.com/Ekryd/sortpom

Upvotes: 2

raisercostin
raisercostin

Reputation: 9189

I used sortpom. See more about parameters at https://github.com/Ekryd/sortpom/wiki/Parameters

mvn com.github.ekryd.sortpom:sortpom-maven-plugin:sort -Dsort.encoding=UTF-8 -Dsort.sortDependencies=scope,groupId,artifactId -Dsort.sortPlugins=groupId,artifactId -Dsort.sortProperties=true -Dsort.sortExecutions=true -Dsort.sortDependencyExclusions=groupId,artifactId -Dsort.lineSeparator="\n" -Dsort.ignoreLineSeparators="false" -Dsort.expandEmptyElements=false -Dsort.nrOfIndentSpace=2 -Dsort.indentSchemaLocation=true

Upvotes: 7

Milen Dyankov
Milen Dyankov

Reputation: 3052

The recently released version 0.2.0 of BOM Helper Maven Plugin now has the sort goal that does exactly that.

You need to add the plugin to your pom:

<plugin>
    <groupId>com.commsen.maven</groupId>
    <artifactId>bom-helper-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>0.2.0</version>
</plugin>

You can configure it to run on every build, but I would rather run it manually only when I add/change a dependency. Something like:

mvn bom-helper:sort -Dbom-helper.inplace=true

should do the job. See the docs for more options.

Upvotes: 7

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