Differences between dependencyManagement and dependencies in Maven

Question

What is the difference between dependencyManagement and dependencies? I have seen the docs at Apache Maven web site. It seems that a dependency def

Answer 1

I'm fashionably late to this question, but I think it's worth a clearer response than the accepted one (which is correct, but doesn't emphasize the actual important part, which you need to deduce yourself).

In the parent POM, the main difference between the and is this:

• Artifacts specified in the section will ALWAYS be included as a dependency of the child module(s).

• Artifacts specified in the section, will only be included in the child module if they were also specified in the section of the child module itself. Why is it good you ask? Because you specify the version and/or scope in the parent, and you can leave them out when specifying the dependencies in the child POM. This can help you use unified versions for dependencies for child modules, without specifying the version in each child module.