spring-core dependency version error with a Jenkins Plugin

Question

I\'m trying to make a Jenkins plugin that uses a library that requires spring-core 3.2.2 (cloudfoundry-client-lib). I simply used the mvn command to create a skeleton plugin, th

Answer 1

If you're picking up dependencies from the Jenkins install rather than from your plugin the solution is actual quite easy to implement. Per the Jenkins documentation, simply add the maven-hpi-plugin to the build in the pom.xml of your Jenkins plugin and set it to load the plugin classes first:

<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.jenkins-ci.tools</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-hpi-plugin</artifactId>
            <configuration>
                <pluginFirstClassLoader>true</pluginFirstClassLoader>
            </configuration>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>

Answer 2

Try to "shade" the CF client lib using the Maven Shade plugin, as it seems Jenkins doesn't like plugins that are using a different version of Spring than the one it uses internally itself.

Even if your own plugin doesn't use Spring directly, but the CF library does, I believe this still applies. The person that suggested shading in the jenkinsci-dev mailing list seems to be involved in Jenkins plugins development, so he might know about this more than others.

These being said, I would get the source code for cf-client-lib, I would change the pom.xml to consider shading for org.springframework package, as well (because cf-client-lib already uses shading for org.codehaus.jackson package) and I would use this "shaded" version of cf-client-lib in the Jenkins plugin.