How do I tell Maven to use the latest version of a dependency?

Question

In Maven, dependencies are usually set up like this:

  wonderful-inc         


        

Answer 1

Unlike others I think there are many reasons why you might always want the latest version. Particularly if you are doing continuous deployment (we sometimes have like 5 releases in a day) and don't want to do a multi-module project.

What I do is make Hudson/Jenkins do the following for every build:

mvn clean versions:use-latest-versions scm:checkin deploy -Dmessage="update versions" -DperformRelease=true

That is I use the versions plugin and scm plugin to update the dependencies and then check it in to source control. Yes I let my CI do SCM checkins (which you have to do anyway for the maven release plugin).

You'll want to setup the versions plugin to only update what you want:

    org.codehaus.mojo
    versions-maven-plugin
    1.2
    
        com.snaphop
        false
        true
    

I use the release plugin to do the release which takes care of -SNAPSHOT and validates that there is a release version of -SNAPSHOT (which is important).

If you do what I do you will get the latest version for all snapshot builds and the latest release version for release builds. Your builds will also be reproducible.

Update

I noticed some comments asking some specifics of this workflow. I will say we don't use this method anymore and the big reason why is the maven versions plugin is buggy and in general is inherently flawed.

It is flawed because to run the versions plugin to adjust versions all the existing versions need to exist for the pom to run correctly. That is the versions plugin cannot update to the latest version of anything if it can't find the version referenced in the pom. This is actually rather annoying as we often cleanup old versions for disk space reasons.

Really you need a separate tool from maven to adjust the versions (so you don't depend on the pom file to run correctly). I have written such a tool in the the lowly language that is Bash. The script will update the versions like the version plugin and check the pom back into source control. It also runs like 100x faster than the mvn versions plugin. Unfortunately it isn't written in a manner for public usage but if people are interested I could make it so and put it in a gist or github.

Going back to workflow as some comments asked about that this is what we do:

1. We have 20 or so projects in their own repositories with their own jenkins jobs
2. When we release the maven release plugin is used. The workflow of that is covered in the plugin's documentation. The maven release plugin sort of sucks (and I'm being kind) but it does work. One day we plan on replacing this method with something more optimal.
3. When one of the projects gets released jenkins then runs a special job we will call the update all versions job (how jenkins knows its a release is a complicated manner in part because the maven jenkins release plugin is pretty crappy as well).
4. The update all versions job knows about all the 20 projects. It is actually an aggregator pom to be specific with all the projects in the modules section in dependency order. Jenkins runs our magic groovy/bash foo that will pull all the projects update the versions to the latest and then checkin the poms (again done in dependency order based on the modules section).
5. For each project if the pom has changed (because of a version change in some dependency) it is checked in and then we immediately ping jenkins to run the corresponding job for that project (this is to preserve build dependency order otherwise you are at the mercy of the SCM Poll scheduler).

At this point I'm of the opinion it is a good thing to have the release and auto version a separate tool from your general build anyway.

Now you might think maven sort of sucks because of the problems listed above but this actually would be fairly difficult with a build tool that does not have a declarative easy to parse extendable syntax (aka XML).

In fact we add custom XML attributes through namespaces to help hint bash/groovy scripts (e.g. don't update this version).