I have an artifact A installed in a local Maven repository.
Artifact A has a number of dependencies - properly specified in its pom.
If I set A as a dependency in a Maven project everything is ok - both A and its dependencies are correctly downloaded. This tells me that A is properly installed in the local Maven repo, and that its dependencies have been properly specified.
I also have a Ant/Ivy project. I have configured ivysettings.xml in the following way (following advice taken from another answer):
<ivysettings>
<settings defaultResolver="default"/>
<property name="m2-pattern" value="${user.home}/.m2/repository/[organisation]/[module]/[revision]/[module]-[revision](-[classifier]).[ext]" override="false" />
<resolvers>
<chain name="default">
<filesystem name="local-maven2" m2compatible="true" >
<artifact pattern="${m2-pattern}"/>
<ivy pattern="${m2-pattern}"/>
</filesystem>
<ibiblio name="central" m2compatible="true"/>
</chain>
</resolvers>
</ivysettings>
With this configuration, Ivy correctly downloads A, but not its dependencies (seems to completely ignore its pom file).
How should I have to change my setup in such a way dependencies as well will be downloaded?
Maven and ivy repositories have different formats. Simplistically put Maven uses POM files, whereas ivy uses ivy files.
The good news is that ivy has a special iniblio resolver which is designed to understand the format of a Maven respository. The bad news is that it does assume such a repository is running remotely, for example using software like Nexus, Artifactory or Achiva.
For example:
<ivysettings>
<settings defaultResolver="repos" />
<resolvers>
<chain name="repos">
<ibiblio name="central" m2compatible="true"/>
<ibiblio name="my-releases" m2compatible="true" root="https://myhost/releases"/>
</chain>
</resolvers>
</ivysettings>
Demonstrates how to pull dependencies from both Maven central and a Maven repository running locally
In conclusion running a Maven repository locally is not hard and the very best way to share artifacts between all kinds of build technologies: Maven, ANT/ivy, Gradle, SBT, etc.
Although Mark O'Connor answer is a proper answer and a reasonable way to solve the problem, I managed to find a different solution which implies imo a lesser overhead in terms of setup.
So, I converted the POM of artifact A to an Ivy file - via the Ant task ivy:convertpom. Note that, contrary to the POM standard, the Ivy file should be named as follows: ivy-<your lib revision>.xml.
Then, I just configured a local Ivy repository pointing to the folder where the artifact A and its Ivy file are located, such as:
<ivysettings>
<property name="my-local-ivy-dependencies-jars.repository" value="${user.dir}\..\my-local-ivy-dependencies-jars/lib"/>
<property name="my-local-ivy-dependencies-jars.pattern" value="${my-local-ivy-dependencies-jars.repository}/[organisation]/jars/[artifact]-[ revision].[ext]"/>
<settings defaultResolver="default"/>
<resolvers>
<chain name="default">
<filesystem name="my-local-ivy-dependencies-jars">
<ivy pattern="${my-local-ivy-dependencies-jars.pattern}" />
<artifact pattern="${my-local-ivy-dependencies-jars.pattern}" />
</filesystem>
<ibiblio name="central" m2compatible="true"/>
</chain>
</resolvers>
</ivysettings>
To complement on Mark O'Connor's answer, you actually can use a local URL with the file:// scheme. The following works for me on Windows (note the triple slash after the scheme):
<ivysettings>
<settings defaultResolver="local-maven" />
<resolvers>
<ibiblio name="local-maven" m2compatible="true"
root="file:///c:/path/to/maven/repo"
pattern="[orgPath]/[module]/[revision]/[artifact]-[revision].[type]"/>
</resolvers>
</ivysettings>
My use of this was retrieving android sdk dependencies in an ant build with ivy.
