Say I have a POM which declares a handful of dependencies in some scope (test in my case but should not matter). These in turn pull in a rather larger number of transitive dependencies. I have the requireUpperBoundDeps Enforcer rule active to ensure that every such transitive dependency is at the newest version required by something “above” it.
My goal is to ensure that every dependency in this tree is at the latest available version (which will sometimes be newer than any stated dependency requirement), while keeping the POM as short as feasible. How can I do this?
mvn versions:display-dependency-updates shows only updates available to immediate dependencies, it seems. I recall that there is an Enforcer rule available to force all dependencies to be explicit, which would solve the issue but at the cost of making the POM much longer—redundantly specifying every transitive dependency, even when it would have been determined to be the currently latest version anyway.
Is there a variant of display-dependency-updates that also processes transitive dependencies?
Related
Maven includes transitive dependencies in a project class path to eliminate the need to redefine these dependencies over and over again each time a module depends on a third party module.
The version of transitive dependencies used can be controlled from a dependency management section in the root pom. So it is controllable.
So why using transitive dependencies in a project without explicitly declaring it in its pom file is considered a bad practice ?
Usually, you update your dependencies after some time.
The update can lead to lost transitive dependencies which will then directly affect your program.
If, on the other hand, you write down all dependencies you use explicitly, it is much easier to make updates and see what you really use.
I have to add a new dependency to a maven project. This dependency has four transitive dependencies(according to http://mvnrepository.com/) and between them, there is spring-data-jpa jar.
The maven project I am working in has many dependencies configured in the pom so I understand there could be a big possibility that there is already a spring-data-jpa dependency in the project(transitive or not).
When you work in a large project with many dependencies and you have to add a new one, how to check if there is already the same transitive dependency of a different version? I have to check manually the transitive dependencies for each direct dependency configured? Has maven a warning for this situation?
How maven works in this situation? I mean, there could be two spring-data-jpa jars of different versions(this would be a problem) or maven resolves this in another way?
The simple answer is that the dependency plugin can tell you. The longer answer is that there are a number of different situations to consider about transitive dependency management, and how the plugin helps and what to do about it differs for each one.
Maven automatically chooses which dependency to include if two dependencies have the same coordinates (groupId, artifactId) with different versions. Broadly speaking, it picks the version that's highest in the tree - effectively overriding dependencies defined in downstream transitive dependency poms. So, if you have two different versions of exactly the same dependency then you will still only find one version of the dependency on the relevant classpath.
The dependency plugin can help you identify this situation by highlighting points where its made a decision, but you probably want to use the dependencyManagement section of your top-level pom to ensure that the dependencies which you bring in are the ones you expect.
Separate difficulties can arise when a dependency changes its groupId or artifactId. Then you can get two dependencies on the classpath - one with an old version on the old coordinates and one with the new version on the new coordinates. As examples, Spring, Hibernate and Apache commons have all found themselves doing this at some point or another. In this case all you can do is use to the dependency plugin to identify duplicated dependencies and then use exclusions tags to explicitly exclude them as transitive dependencies from the dependencies which are pull them in.
It's important to note that all of this dependency management can cause unintended breakage. If the thing that your application depends on really does depend on some specific version of a package as a transitive dependency then you can break it by overriding that version. So testing the features that you use is essential.
Have you tried the Maven Dependency Plugin? There's some useful goals you can run, such as mvn dependency:tree etc.
I have a Maven project that depends on numerous other projects, which often have several conflicting dependencies.
Maven will automatically resolve dependency conflicts using its nearest-wins strategy, in which case it will list the chosen version on the result mvn dependency:tree:
[INFO] | - (commons-collections:commons-collections:jar:2.1:compile - omitted for conflict with 2.0)
In this example, should commons-collections:2.1 be chosen, I would have an alternate dependency tree, potentially containing multiple other dependencies.
What I need to know is how this alternate tree would look like should the other version be chosen.
The way I'm currently doing is identifying the top level dependency that has conflicts with other dependencies, and running dependency tree just for it, i.e. by effectively creating multiple new poms with a single dependency just for the purpose of obtain their trees. This works, and I can write a script for that, but it's a manual process. I'm looking for Maven goal or other approach, which would act on my pom making things straightforward.
I've looked at other goals of the Maven dependency plugin such as analyse, but they do not appear to be helpful in this case.
There is no plugin that does exactly that, but there is a plugin that can help deal with the nearest-win maven dependency resolution strategy, and protect against it's occasionally unintended consequences.
It's the maven enforcer plugin, that with it's dependencyConvergence rule basically turns off the maven nearest-win strategy. With that rule applied to a build, if there is a dependency on version 1 of a transitive library, but also a dependency on version 2 of the same library, the build will fail.
This is a fail early mechanism that will allow to detect when the maven nearest dependency mechanism kicks in and silently makes a choice for a library version that we would prefer to do ourselves based on some code/library analysis.
What you can do with this plugin is to fix the current build by choosing the versions you want one by one, and then turn on the dependencyConvergence for future builds. This will ensure that you won't have to do the same analysis and fix in a near future, whe someone else changes the poms and the problem occurs again.
When there is a conflict in the dependency tree (same artifact but different versions) then, AFAIK, Maven will resolve the conflict by selecting the highest version of the dependency and will omit the 'old' ones.
However, when the newer version is a SNAPSHOT then apparently it will choose the older stable version over the SNAPSHOT.
In my case: some-artifact: 0.5.0-SNAPSHOTS (omitted for conflict with 0.4.0) => version 0.4.0 is picked over the wanted 0.5.0-SNAPSHOT.
I assume this functions as designed but I don't understand the reason why. Next to that, any idea if there is a way to tell Maven to take the SNAPSHOT over the stable version?
Your assumption about Maven's always selecting the highest version isn't accurate. Artifacts are chosen based on a number of factors including depth of the dependency in the tree, order in the tree, whether the dependency is a snapshot or a release, and dependency management, which pretty much overrides everything else.
Unfortunately, I don't know of any one, definitive source of information on Maven's dependency resolution algorithms. You'll find bits and pieces of it scattered all over. A few handy references:
Introduction to the Dependency Mechanism gives an overview of the topic with a good, if short, section on Transitive Dependencies and how they're selected from a dependency tree.
The Sonatype Maven book has a more thorough section on Project Dependencies in general that will add a lot to your knowledge about the subject.
An earlier section of that same book discusses Project Versions, which is strongly related to this problem and has a good section on SNAPSHOT versions, though not as much as I could wish on how they play into dependency resolution.
Project Relationships talks about the coordinate system and how project inheritance affects what dependencies get included.
Finally, the POM Reference is a good jumping-off point for almost anything to do with the pom. There's at least a brief description of every pom element that can help you understand enough to be able to begin searching for more info effectively.
As for some practical advice, the output of mvn dependency:tree is highly useful in discovering why a particular version of a dependency was chosen. It'll often even tell you something like "foo:bar:1.2 (was 1.1)". Once you figure out where the errant version is coming from, there are a number of ways to ensure a specific dependency version is used for a project:
Exclude wrongly-versioned dependencies from other dependencies that are causing them to be included in the build.
Add an explicit top-level dependency to your pom instead of relying on a transitive dependency.
List the dependency in the dependencyManagement section of your pom (scroll down a bit from this link) to force the dependency to have the specified characteristics, regardless of what level of transitive dependency it is. Use this option with care, as dependencyManagement is viral, in that other projects depending on your project will be "infected" with your dependency management. There's also a good section on dependency management in the pom reference.
If the 0.4.0 version is being pulled in as a transitive dependency via another dependency in your POM, then you should be able to exclude it. The dependency:tree goal should help you see if this is what's happening.
Maven is designed to favor release versions over snapshot versions. I'm not sure why you would have two dependencies in the same POM and not be able to resolve a conflict by removing one, so I will assume that one of the dependencies is inherited from a parent pom. In this case you can set the inherited dependency as <optional>true</optional> and I THINK it should allow the child POMs to override it, even with a lower version.
bad/hacky solution for if that doesn't work - edit your local repository in such a way that it doesn't realize the 0.5.0 version is a snapshot (or even edit your private nexus repo if you have the ability)
I'm playing around with gradle trying to port my maven project and here's my problem:
In maven we have the <dependencyManagement> which provides a common (default) version for certain dependencies (which is used only when in a sub-pom this artifact is used without a version number). It also, from what I understand, forces a certain version for all transitive dependencies. So if I understand correctly even if artifact B which we have as a dependency has a dependency on artifact C version 1.0 then we will still use a version of artifact C defined in the <dependencyManagement> (so it might be 2.0). Is that correct?
If so then is there a way to do something similar in Gradle? I know that a common way of replacing the <dependencyManagement> is to simply create a Groovy map in one of the build scripts. But how can I force the transitive dependency version? If I use Gradle's "force" won't it affect all (not only transitive) dependencies (which is obviously not what I want)?
In Gradle, forcing a version (e.g. with Configuration.resolutionStrategy.force) will force it for all dependencies of the configuration, direct and transitive. There is no first-class feature that forces a version only for transitive dependencies. Do you have a valid use case for this? At the end of the day, both Gradle and Maven will select a single version for a dependency anyway, no matter where and how often it appears in the dependency tree.
There is a ResolutionStrategy feature that allows forcing artifacts versions including transitive dependencies: https://docs.gradle.org/current/dsl/org.gradle.api.artifacts.ResolutionStrategy.html
It is also possible to configure dependencies constraints: https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/dependency_constraints.html