CODEWITHSUNDEEP
mavennexus
chad
chad

Reputation: 7519

How does my pom find my parent pom if the repositories are configured in the parent pom?

I've refactored all repository configuration out of my various projects into a parent pom that I've created for the specific purpose of having a single point of configuration for stuff like repo's and distribution management. This is supposed to be best practice as I understand it. In deployed my parent pom to the nexus server, and then tried to run my child projects. They can't find my parent pom . . . this kind of makes sense to me since, wihtout the parent pom they don't know about the nexus repo . . . seems like a chicken and egg kind of thing? Am I missing something obvious?

Upvotes: 27

Views: 22762

Answers (2)

alexfdz
alexfdz

Reputation: 435

You must maintain the repositories definitions for each child (maven module), this is main best practice in a build process: "Make the build portable".

Any developer/system should be able to build any module without source dependencies to the parent or other modules, only with the repository reference.

Upvotes: 10

Conan
Conan

Reputation: 2348

It's true that your project needs to know where to find the repositories to download its dependencies. But before going to external repositories, Maven will check your local repository to see if the artifacts it needs are in there. Does your local repository contain the parent pom? If not, you can add it by running

mvn install

on the parent pom. The problem may have been caused by deploying the parent pom directly to Nexus, bypassing your local one. You can avoid this in future by deploying using 

mvn deploy

This will first install the artifact locally, and then deploy it to the external repository (Nexus, in your case). More details here: http://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-the-lifecycle.html

If you're in a situation whereby your parent pom is built and deployed by others, this won't help. You can either specify the repositories in your project's pom, or in your local settings.xml. A common approach is to expect all developers to include a repository definition in their local settings.xml which points to your Nexus repository, using it as a mirror for all other repositories. You can then configure each external repository you need in Nexus, and let it retrieve any dependencies you need for you. I'm not familiar with Nexus, but more details on mirroring can be found here: http://maven.apache.org/guides/mini/guide-mirror-settings.html

Upvotes: 13

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