Blacklist Maven dependencies

Question

Is there a way e.g. a Maven plug in that can take a list of unwanted/black listed dependencies (direct and transitive) and fails the build if it detects one of listed depend

Answer 1

Yes, the enforcer plugin supports this with its bannedDependencies rule.

Answer 2

You can ban some dependencies using the maven-enforcer-plugin.

Here is their example with updates for your exclusion of Apache Commons Logging.

<project>
  [...]
  <build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-enforcer-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>1.1.1</version>
        <executions>
          <execution>
            <id>enforce-banned-dependencies</id>
            <goals>
              <goal>enforce</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
              <rules>
                <bannedDependencies>
                  <excludes>
                    <exclude>commons-logging:commons-logging</exclude>
                  </excludes>
                </bannedDependencies>
              </rules>
              <fail>true</fail>
            </configuration>
          </execution>
        </executions>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>
  [...]
</project>

The output when running mvn install will be:

[WARNING] Rule 1: org.apache.maven.plugins.enforcer.BannedDependencies failed with message:
Found Banned Dependency: commons-logging:commons-logging:jar:1.1.1
Use 'mvn dependency:tree' to locate the source of the banned dependencies.

It all ends with a BUILD FAILURE.