Resolve Local Maven Project as Dependency in Jenkins

Question

I have two maven Projects call them as MainProject and DependnecyProject. I use DependnecyProject functions in the MainProject project which means DependnecyProject is a dependency for MainProject Project.

MainProject pom.xml

    <dependency>
        <groupId>testgroup</groupId>
        <artifactId>DependnecyProject</artifactId>
        <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
        <scope>compile</scope>
    </dependency>

In my local eclipse, this is completely perfect and the execution doesn't have any problem.

I have both of these Projects in Git and I have two Jobs created in Jenkins named Main and Dependency. I have a Pre Step in the Main job to build the Dependency first and then build Main.

Dependency job is successful but the Main job is failing saying the dependency mentioned above (DependnecyProject) cannot be resolved. This can be understood as the Jenkins and Maven is not able to find the dependency. Is there a way to make sure the Jenkins resolve the dependency?

Alternately, I have tried one more solution In My Local, I have tried to use in MainProject POM.XML

    <dependency>
        <groupId>testgroup</groupId>
        <artifactId>DependnecyProject</artifactId>
        <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
        <scope>system</scope>
        <systemPath>C:\Users\cpratap\New-Workspace\Child\target\Parent-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar</systemPath>
    </dependency>

which is working perfectly in local, but not sure how to make it work the same in the Jenkins?

Update: In the Jenkins Main job, I did below configuration (as suggested by @Ian W). Though it is a poor work around as mentioned, this really worked.

1. Followed the same configuration
2. In the Main Jenkins job, I have three Pre-Steps
3. One Pre-Step is to trigger the Dependency Job
4. Second Pre-Step is to copy the artifacts from Dependency to Main
5. Third Pre-Step is to install the Dependency into the local repo using "Invoke Top Level Maven Targets" and used below in Goal install:install-file -Dfile= -DgroupId= -DartifactId= -Dversion= -Dpackaging=jar

This completely solved my problem and I could run the build and run my test cases without any issues. Thank you all for the support

Answer 1

If you put a jar in vcs along with you source code, then the way to do that is to declare you repository in you pom.xml file, and use you jar as a dependency.

For example, if you put your jar to lib directory of you projects, that's how you use it in you project. Suppose you jar name is hello-world-library-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar, you want your groupId to be com.local , your artifactId hello-world-library-local and version is 1.0-SNAPSHOT

First you should create local repository in your project's directory and put your jar there.

mvn \
deploy:deploy-file \
-Durl=file:./lib \
-Dfile=hello-world-library-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar \
-DgroupId=com.local \
-DartifactId=hello-world-library-local \
-Dpackaging=jar \
-Dversion=1.0-SNAPSHOT

Then add local repository to you pom.xml

<repositories>
    <repository>
        <id>localrep</id>
        <name>local repository</name>
        <url>file:${project.basedir}/lib</url>
    </repository>
</repositories>

And then, add you jar as a dependency to dependencies block in your pom.xml file

    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.local</groupId>
            <artifactId>hello-world-library-local</artifactId>
            <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>

You can use that if you want to distribute you jar with your source code and don't want to mess with your project's setting every time you're building on a new machine.

But this is not recommended to use in enterprise environment. You NEVER put repository block in your pom.xml, unless that's your toy project, or your really know what you are doing

If you don't want to copy your jar to your project's directory every time, you should consider converting your projects to a single multi module maven project.