Goals Overview

The Dependency plugin has several goals:

• dependency:copy takes a list of artifacts defined in the plugin configuration section and copies them to a specified location, renaming them or stripping the version if desired. This goal can resolve the artifacts from remote repositories if they don't exist in local.
• dependency:copy-dependencies takes the list of project direct dependencies and optionally transitive dependencies and copies them to a specified location, stripping the version if desired. This goal can also be run from the command line.
• dependency:unpack like copy but unpacks.
• dependency:unpack-dependencies like copy-dependencies but unpacks.
• dependency:resolve tells Maven to resolve all dependencies and displays the version.
• dependency:list is an alias for dependency:resolve
• dependency:sources tells Maven to resolve all dependencies and their source attachments, and displays the version.
• dependency:resolve-plugins Tells Maven to resolve plugins and their dependencies.
• dependency:list alias for resolve that lists the dependencies for this project.
• dependency:go-offline tells Maven to resolve everything this project is dependent on (dependencies, plugins, reports) in preparation for going offline.
• dependency:purge-local-repository tells Maven to clear all dependency-artifact files out of the local repository, and optionally re-resolve them.
• dependency:build-classpath tells Maven to output the path of the dependencies from the local repository in a classpath format to be used in java -cp. The classpath file may also be attached and installed/deployed along with the main artifact.
• dependency:analyze analyzes the dependencies of this project and determines which are: used and declared; used and undeclared; unused and declared.
• dependency:analyze-only is the same as analyze, but is meant to be bound in a pom. It does not fork the build and execute test-compile.
• dependency:analyze-dep-mgt analyzes your projects dependencies and lists mismatches between resolved dependencies and those listed in your dependencyManagement section.
• dependency:tree displays the dependency tree for this project.

Usage

• Instructions on how to use the dependency plugin can be found here .

Examples

The following examples show how to use the dependency plugin in more advanced use-cases:

• Instructions on how to prepare your dependencies for upgrade to Maven 2.0.6 / 2.1 .
• Copying Specific Artifacts
• Copying Project Dependencies
• Unpacking Specific Artifacts
• Unpacking the Project Dependencies

Resources

Here is a link that provides more reference regarding dependencies (i.e. dependency management, transitive dependencies).

• Dependency Mechanism