how to add external jar to maven webapp project

Question

I have a Spring roo project (basically a maven project). I want to add dropbox sdk to the project, problem is it\'s not in maven. I added the following files

Answer 1

I don't recommend this approach, but you could add some POM configuration to install the 3rd-party dependency in a separate profile:

    
        install-dependencies
        
            
                
                    maven-install-plugin
                    2.3.1
                    
                        
                            install-dropbox-sdk
                            validate
                            
                                install-file
                            
                            
                                com.dropbox
                                dropbox-sdk
                                1.3.1
                                src/main/lib/dropbox-java-sdk-1.3.1.jar
                                jar
                            
                        
                    
                
            
        
    

    
        build
        
            true
        

        
            
                com.dropbox
                dropbox-sdk
                1.3.1
            
        
    

There are two profiles here: install-dependencies and build. The first installs the dropbox-sdk dependency into your Maven repository and needs to be run once on every machine as follows:

mvn -Pinstall-dependencies validate

The second is enabled by default, and adds the Dropbox SDK as a dependency.

To be honest though, this isn't much better than running

mvn install:install-file -Dfile=src/main/lib/dropbox-java-sdk-1.3.1.jar -DgroupId=com.dropbox -DartifactId=dropbox-sdk -Dversion=1.3.1 -Dpackaging=jar

on every machine.

The other downside of this approach is that you'll have to add all dependencies of the dropbox-sdk to your build as well- whereas if it is done properly by adding the JAR and a POM to a repository server, then Maven will calculate the transitive dependencies properly.