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How to add external jar files to Maven project POM

Published by Zaheer

Maven has made compiling Java projects almost an effortless job. You no longer need to worry about placing all the required class files in your classpath. All you have to do is to include dependencies in your POM file and Maven takes care of the rest. It automatically downloads the jar file that your project depends on and include them in your build classpath. But what if you want to include a jar file that is not available from Maven repositories? To include such jar files you will have to manually install the jar into your local maven repository. Let say you need Oracle driver which is included in ojdbc14.jar. Download the jar file from Oracle and then execute following command.

C:\>mvn install:install-file -Dfile=ojdbc14.jar -DgroupId=com.oracle -DartifactId=ojdbc14 -Dversion=10.2.0 -Dpackaging=jar

Then add this dependency to your project POM file.

<dependency>
      <groupId>com.oracle</groupId>
      <artifactId>ojdbc14</artifactId>
      <version>10.2.0</version>
      <scope>compile</scope>
</dependency>

Now when you build your project ojdb14.jar will be available.

You can follow the same steps for your own jar files. For example if you have created a jar file (e.g. utils.jar) of helper classes and need that jar file in some other project you will first install the jar to your repository and then add the dependency in your POM file.

C:\>mvn install:install-file -Dfile=utils.jar -DgroupId=com.zparacha.example -DartifactId=utils -Dversion=1.0 -Dpackaging=jar

And the dependency for your POM will be like

<dependency>
      <groupId>com.zparacha.example</groupId>
      <artifactId>utils</artifactId>
      <version>1.0.0</version>
      <scope>compile</scope>
</dependency>