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

Sometimes you don't want to use version ranges, because it seems that they are "slow" to resolve your dependencies, especially when there is continuous delivery in place and there are tons of versions - mainly during heavy development.

One workaround would be to use the versions-maven-plugin. For example, you can declare a property:

    1.1.1

and add the versions-maven-plugin to your pom file:

    
        
            org.codehaus.mojo
            versions-maven-plugin
            2.3
            
                
                    
                        myname.version
                        
                            
                                group-id
                                artifact-id
                                latest
                            
                        
                    
                
            
        
    

Then, in order to update the dependency, you have to execute the goals:

mvn versions:update-properties validate

If there is a version newer than 1.1.1, it will tell you:

[INFO] Updated ${myname.version} from 1.1.1 to 1.3.2