Simplest Ivy code to programmatically retrieve dependency from Maven Central

Question

I find the Ivy API to be immensely complicated.

What is the simplest possible snippet to retrieve an artifact from Maven Central into a specific local directory usin

Answer 1

The simplest way to retrieve an artifact (and it's dependencies) is to use ivy from the command-line

java -jar ivy.jar -dependency commons-logging commons-logging 1.1 -retrieve "/my/destination/[artifact](-[classifier]).[ext]"

This will retrieve the files into the directory "/my/destination".

Other examples:

• using IVY dependencies manager programmatically
• Using Maven to download dependencies to a directory on the command line