Always Crispy

This topic is probably trivial to Maven veterans however, to people getting started, it is pretty important. As you probably already know if you got here from Googling, Maven is a neat build tool for Java that goes out and downloads all your jar dependencies for you. For example, if you need to use the apache commons lang package, you specify the dependency in your pom.xml Maven will download it for you. Under the hood, what is happening is that Maven will first check your local package repository, located in a directory called .m2 in your home directory, and if it cannot find the package there, it will check remote repositories.

This approach is great for Maven distributed packages and the most commonly used ones are available. If you happen to need to use a package that is not available though, then you will have to install it locally in order for Maven to build your applications with it. This situation happened to me when my work got a license for a new DBMS that had a closed source driver.

Installing a jar is relevantly painless. Simply use the install:install-file goal. Your command should look similar to the one below.

mvn install:install-file -Dfile=closed-source-driver.jar -DgroupId=com.closed-source -DartifactId=com.closed-source.driver -Dversion=1.0 -Dpackaging=jar

Once you have installed the jar, you can now include it as a dependency in any of your projects. Based on the example above, the dependency tag in your pom.xml should look like the following.

<dependency>
<groupId>com.closed-source</groupId>
<artifactId>com.closed-source.driver</artifactId>
<version>1.0</version>
<scope>compile</scope>
</dependency>