Command line tool for resolving dependencies on the JVM.
NOTE: This is a very early draft of this tool. The social contract is that if you use it and find it useful, I will be available to help you adapt to any changes. But I will still make breaking changes if I have to. Expect rough edges.
There are packages generated in CI which can be added to your path. Click on the latest workflow run and there should be downloads at the bottom of the page.
For M1 Macs, GitHub does not provide an executor with a compatible CPU, so I'm building those locally for now. Shoot me a message and I can send you an exe or you can build locally if you have maven, just, and native-image on your machine.
For Mac and Linux you can install a version that depends on having Java 21+ installed with the following command.
bash < <(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bowbahdoe/jresolve-cli/main/install)
Very much a work in progress.
The concept is that you provide a "package url" for every dependency you want to have at runtime. The tool will then output a path containing those dependencies as well as any transitive dependencies.
For a simple dependency like commons-collections4, you will get a path
to its jar.
jresolve pkg:maven/org.apache.commons/[email protected]
/Users/emccue/.jresolve/cache/https/repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/apache/commons/commons-collections4/4.4/commons-collections4-4.4.jar
For dependencies like jdbi3-postgres, which have dependencies of their own,
you will get a path containing the jars of the entire dependency tree.
jresolve pkg:maven/org.jdbi/[email protected]
/Users/emccue/.jresolve/cache/https/repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/slf4j/slf4j-api/1.7.36/slf4j-api-1.7.36.jar:/Users/emccue/.jresolve/cache/https/repo1.maven.org/maven2/jakarta/annotation/jakarta.annotation-api/2.1.1/jakarta.annotation-api-2.1.1.jar:/Users/emccue/.jresolve/cache/https/repo1.maven.org/maven2/com/google/errorprone/error_prone_annotations/2.22.0/error_prone_annotations-2.22.0.jar:/Users/emccue/.jresolve/cache/https/repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/checkerframework/checker-qual/3.38.0/checker-qual-3.38.0.jar:/Users/emccue/.jresolve/cache/https/repo1.maven.org/maven2/io/leangen/geantyref/geantyref/1.3.14/geantyref-1.3.14.jar:/Users/emccue/.jresolve/cache/https/repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/jdbi/jdbi3-core/3.41.3/jdbi3-core-3.41.3.jar:/Users/emccue/.jresolve/cache/https/repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/jdbi/jdbi3-postgres/3.41.3/jdbi3-postgres-3.41.3.jar
If you have more than one dependency, you can provide them one after another on the command line.
jresolve pkg:maven/org.apache.commons/[email protected] \
pkg:maven/org.junit.jupiter/[email protected]
/Users/emccue/.jresolve/cache/https/repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/junit/platform/junit-platform-commons/1.10.1/junit-platform-commons-1.10.1.jar:/Users/emccue/.jresolve/cache/https/repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/apiguardian/apiguardian-api/1.1.2/apiguardian-api-1.1.2.jar:/Users/emccue/.jresolve/cache/https/repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/opentest4j/opentest4j/1.3.0/opentest4j-1.3.0.jar:/Users/emccue/.jresolve/cache/https/repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/apache/commons/commons-collections4/4.4/commons-collections4-4.4.jar:/Users/emccue/.jresolve/cache/https/repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/junit/jupiter/junit-jupiter-api/5.10.1/junit-jupiter-api-5.10.1.jar
Or you can put them all into a file separated by newlines.
deps:
pkg:maven/org.apache.commons/[email protected]
pkg:maven/org.junit.jupiter/[email protected]
Then you can use that as an argfile. Put @ before the filename and the args will
expand out.
jresolve @deps
If you have sets of dependencies which are available at different points in your project's lifecycle, you can use multiple argfiles for them.
jresolve @deps/compile
(includes both compile and runtime dependencies)
jresolve @deps/compile @deps/runtime
If you want to pass the result of a dependency resolution to tools like javac you have a few options
The first is that, if your shell supports it, you can use the output of the tool inline with an invocation.
java --class-path $(jresolve @deps) src/Main.java
The more portable option is to run the tool and put the results into a file.
jresolve --output-file build/argfiles/runtime @deps/compile @deps/runtime
And then use the argfile when invoking the tool.
java --class-path @build/argfiles/runtime src/Main.java
Most tools in the JVM support expanding arguments from argfiles with @, but there
are some exceptions. A notable one is jshell, for some reason.
If you need to include a path to a specific file or folder in your final --class-path or --module-path
you can do that in one of two ways.
The first is to include it as-is. Anything that cannot be parsed as a URL will be forwarded directly to the final path.
jresolve pkg:maven/org.apache.commons/[email protected] some/other/path
/Users/emccue/.jresolve/cache/https/repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/apache/commons/commons-collections4/4.4/commons-collections4-4.4.jar:some/other/path
The second is to supply it as an argument with a file:/// url. Keep in mind that such urls
are always absolute paths and as such likely won't be portable to other machines.
jresolve pkg:maven/org.apache.commons/[email protected] file:///an/absolute/path
/Users/emccue/.jresolve/cache/https/repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/apache/commons/commons-collections4/4.4/commons-collections4-4.4.jar:/an/absolute/path
If you need to include files hosted on some remote source, there is limited support for that.
If you provide an https:// url, that file will be downloaded and put onto the final path.
There is no support for, and no plans to support, files hosted via other protocols like tcp or http
or to support getting files behind urls which require authentication.
jresolve https://piston-data.mojang.com/v1/objects/5b868151bd02b41319f54c8d4061b8cae84e665c/server.jar
If you are curious what it would look like to make an actual project using this and other JVM tools instead of a full build system, there is a demo of that here.
Getting IDEs to recognize what dependencies are made available is unsolved, but definitely solvable.
If you make a json file like this
{
"jitpack": {
"url": "https://jitpack.io"
}
}You can supply it to the tool
jresolve --maven-repositories-file repositories.json @deps
And include the repository to use on a specific coordinate.
pkg:maven/com.github.thegatesdev/[email protected]?repository=jitpack
To use a repository that requires username + password authentication, include an object with those credentials in your json file.
{
"jitpack": {
"url": "https://jitpack.io",
"authentication": {
"username": "bob",
"password": "123"
}
}
}It is annoying to write pkg:maven in front of everything. It also makes the syntax for overriding
properties of dependencies a bit wonky - ?repository=jitpack and such.
Those are the downsides. The upside is that it is possible to support other kinds of dependency declarations. The underlying resolver is based on tools.deps and is agnostic to maven. It should be relatively straightforward to add support for git dependencies (without going through jitpack), local dependencies (not just files, but locally developed projects with their own dependency manifests), and whatever else is relevant.
Short answer
- Maven lags behind in its support for JVM tools, this approach is more generically composable. Tons of pros and cons to that.
- Gradle is similar, but also ties itself to Groovy and Kotlin. I'm pretty sick of having to tell people to learn two languages in order to learn Java.
- Ivy is technically very generic, but it suffers greatly from being made in the days of XML and Ant.
- I wanted to make something which is directly usable with the upcoming Multi-File Source-Code Programs
- I want to make the "command line flow" actually practical instead of a strange joke we play on early students before saying "sike!" and giving them maven or gradle.
Elaboration available upon request.