How to include a maven module outside of the project context?

Question

I\'d like to have a module in some kind of global project directory, so that I can include that module in all other projects that use that common code.

But how can I

Answer 1

If you run mvn install on that global project, it will be installed in your local repository. Your other projects can then reference it as a dependency:

  whatever
  project-commons
  1.0

The downside of this simplistic approach is that your other projects won't compile until you've checked-out project-commons and run mvn install.

A more advanced approach is to deploy a network-accessible repository (such as Artifactory or Nexus) which you can deploy global artifacts to. Artifactory has a community edition which is free. You can then list this repository in your settings file and Maven will resolve artifacts that are uploaded to it.