How to add existing jars using maven...

[Praveen Babu]

Hi Friends,

I am new to maven. I am trying to change my existing project(using ant previously) to maven. I facing a problem adding my existing jars to the project. I have learnt from the internet that to do this, i have 2 options

1. Intalling the dependencies from the repository.
2. Add to the local repository (file by file) using
mvn install:install-file -Dfile=<path-to-file> -DgroupId=<group-id> \
-DartifactId=<artifact-id> -Dversion=<version> -Dpackaging=<packaging>

I dont want to install a huge number of files from the repository, so tried
second option but its really hard for me to install each jar file one by one. Is there any better option or something to automate this task ? Please help.

Thanks in advance,
P R A V E E N

[Tim Holloway]

I hope you're only trying to add your own jars, since Maven will automatically cache stuff as you use it - you don't have to manually install the public library jars.

What I'd do is make up a spreadsheet, one jar per row, with the columns containing the packaging info, export the spreadsheet to text and build a script that would take that text and substitute the data into maven commands, then execute those commands. Which is simpler than it sounds.

A real VBA geek might actually write an Excel macro to generate the maven commands out to a text file, but the end result is the same.