Maven Tip: Adding a Custom Jar to your Maven Project

Sometimes you come across a jar which you want to include in your Maven project but is not in Maven Central.  This happened to me recently with a great web scraping library called jaunt which I wanted to include in my Maven java project.

One way (maybe the best way) is to add the jar to you local Maven repository which you can do with this command.

mvn install:install-file -Dfile=jaunt0.9.9.4.jar -DgroupId=com.jaunt.code -DartifactId=jaunt -Dversion=0.9.9.4 -Dpackaging=jar

Then add to your dependencies in Maven as below:

 <dependency>
            <groupId>com.jaunt.code</groupId>
            <artifactId>jaunt</artifactId>
            <version>0.9.9.4</version>
  </dependency>

The issue with this methodology is if you want to share your project with people who don't have access to you local Maven repository.  For example, if you want to put your project on Git for general release.

Of course you could always check in the actual source but that's not always possible or necessarily desirable. If you have any good solutions please leave in the comments.