How can you display the Maven dependency tree for the *plugins* in your project?

Question

A common Maven debugging technique is to use mvn dependency:tree to view the graph of project dependencies.

However, this list shows the project dependencies, not

Answer 1

The output via mvn -X will printout the information indirectly. Currently there is no other option to get the dependencies of a Maven-Plugin.

Update You can use the following command to get a list of plugin dependencies (resolve-plugin goal from dependencies plugin):

mvn org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-dependency-plugin:2.10:resolve-plugins

The shorter version is (and it is a bad habit to specify plugin versions)

mvn dependency:resolve-plugins

Answer 2

If you are using any IDE like IDEA IntelliJ or Eclipse:

• You can add this below plugin in your pom.xml
• Once done, On the Maven window (on the right of IDE), you will find a new plugin called as Dependencies
• Expand that and you will see the dependency:tree goal, double click on it and run it, you should see the full dependency tree

Plugin to be added in POM:

<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <artifactId>maven-dependency-plugin</artifactId>
            <configuration>
                <source>1.8</source>
                <target>1.8</target>
            </configuration>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>