Maven: best way of linking custom external JAR to

Question

It's my first couple of days learning Maven and I'm still struggling with the basics. I have an external .jar file (not available in the public repos) that I need to reference in my project and I'm trying to figure out what my best option is.

It's a small scale project without a central repository for libraries, so it has to be either a local repository (somehow added to source control, don't know if it's supposed to work that way?) or the .jar needs to be stored on disk outside of any formal repository.

1) What's my best option for adding the .jar file to my project's references with maven given that I want both the project and the library to be in source control?

2) I still can't seem to have Eclipse see the dependency. I manually added it to the section of the pom, and it shows up fine in the Dependencies list in m2eclipse. mvn compile and mvn package both succeed, but running the program results in:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.Error: Unresolved compilation problems:
        LibraryStuff cannot be resolved to a type

This is after editing the POM as:

<dependency>
  <groupId>stuff</groupId>
  <artifactId>library</artifactId>
  <version>1.0</version>
  <systemPath>${lib.location}/MyLibrary.jar</systemPath>
  <scope>system</scope>
</dependency>

Should I be executing mvn install:install-file even thought I already have the pom.xml edited as above?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Change your systemPath.

<dependency>
  <groupId>stuff</groupId>
  <artifactId>library</artifactId>
  <version>1.0</version>
  <systemPath>${project.basedir}/MyLibrary.jar</systemPath>
  <scope>system</scope>
</dependency>

Answer 2

The pom.xml is going to look at your local repository to try and find the dependency that matches your artifact. Also you shouldn't really be using the system scope or systemPath attributes, these are normally reserved for things that are in the JDK and not the JRE

See this question for how to install maven artifacts.