ivy dependency on external JAR

Question

I am battling with Ivy (I tried maven but had an event more difficult time setting up the JBoss repository for Hibernate).

Quick question - I am using this wonderful package: http://ooweb.sourceforge.net/index.html

Unfortunately, the JAR is only available through Sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ooweb/files/ooweb/0.8.0/ooweb-0.8.0-bin.tar.gz/download

Is there a way to get Ivy to download a specific JAR?

For that matter, is it possible to do with Maven?

Or for that matter, how about Gradle?

Thank you! Misha

Answer 1

Let's see if I understood you correctly ..

I can't speak for Ivy, but with Maven, you will sometimes have to install JARs manually to a repository, such as your local and possibly the one used when building your software.

Download the jar to your drive, and do something like this on command line:

mvn install:install-file -Dfile=ooweb.jar -DgroupId=ooweb -DartifactId=ooweb -Dversion=0.8.0 -Dpackaging=jar 

Pick a more sophisticated groupId is you want, these are what you'll use in your pom when defining the dependency.

Was there some specific issue you ran into when setting up the JBoss repo? I did it a while ago by just adding this at the end of a pom:

<repositories>
 <repository>
  <id>jboss</id>
  <url>http://repository.jboss.com/maven2</url>
  <releases>
    <enabled>true</enabled>
  </releases>
  <snapshots>
    <enabled>false</enabled>
  </snapshots>
</repository>
<repository>
  <id>jboss-snapshot</id>
  <url>http://snapshots.jboss.org/maven2</url>
  <releases>
    <enabled>true</enabled>
  </releases>
  <snapshots>
    <enabled>true</enabled>
  </snapshots>
</repository>

Answer 2

You can use ivy's packager resolver to turn any downloadable package into an ivy module.

See also the ivy roundup repository

My example project consists of the following files:

$ find . -type f
./build.xml
./ivy.xml
./ivysettings.xml
./repository/net.sourceforge/ooweb/0.8.0/packager.xml

ivy.xml

Normal ivy file declaring a dependency against the ooweb module:

<ivy-module version="2.0">
    <info organisation="com.myspotontheweb" module="packager_demo"/>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency org="net.sourceforge" name="ooweb" rev="0.8.0"/>
    </dependencies>
</ivy-module>

ivysettings.xml

The Maven central repository is setup as the default repository. The special "packager" resolver is used to retrieve the ooweb module.

The artifact pattern points at the packager file containing the instructions on how to download the module artifacts.

<ivysettings>
    <settings defaultResolver="central"/>
        <resolvers>
           <ibiblio name="central" m2compatible="true"/>
            <packager name="packager" buildRoot="${user.home}/.ivy2/packager/build" resourceCache="${user.home}/.ivy2/packager/cache" preserveBuildDirectories="false">
                <ivy pattern="file:///${ivy.settings.dir}/repository/[organisation]/[module]/[revision]/ivy.xml"/>
                <artifact pattern="file:///${ivy.settings.dir}/repository/[organisation]/[module]/[revision]/packager.xml"/>
            </packager>
        </resolvers>
        <modules>
            <module organisation="net.sourceforge" name="ooweb" resolver="packager"/>
        </modules>
</ivysettings>

packager.xml

Here is the magic. The resource declaration gives the location of the tar package. The build section contains the ANT instructions on which files to move into the module's artifacts section.

<packager-module version="1.0">
    <property name="name" value="${ivy.packager.module}"/>
    <property name="version" value="${ivy.packager.revision}"/>
    <property name="packagename" value="${name}-${version}"/>

    <resource dest="archive" url="http://sourceforge.net/projects/ooweb/files/ooweb/0.8.0/ooweb-0.8.0-bin.tar.gz/download" sha1="d886a3d48bf4380cbec3e6f7de029f01e5c55315" type="tar.gz"/>

    <build>
        <move file="archive/${packagename}/lib/${packagename}.jar" tofile="artifacts/jars/${name}.jar"/>
    </build>
</packager-module>

Note: Under the hood ivy uses an XSLT stylesheet to generate an ANT script from the packager declaration. This ANT script will then download the artifact and place it into the ivy cache.

Update

Gradle embeds ivy, so this packager solution should work for two build technologies. See this answer.