How to copy dependencies jars (without test jars) to a directory using maven?

Mike answered their own question in a comment above. I think Mike's use case is similar to mine where I want to copy all of the jars I depend upon as well as my own jar in order to create a directory hierarchy sufficient to execute the program without including those dependencies directly into my own jar.

The answer to achieve this is:

<includeScope>compile</includeScope>

This directive goes into the section of the pom.xml for the maven-dependency plugin. For example:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-dependency-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.4</version>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>copy-dependencies</id>
            <phase>prepare-package</phase>
            <goals>
                <goal>copy-dependencies</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
                <outputDirectory>${project.build.directory}/lib</outputDirectory>
                <includeScope>compile</includeScope>
            </configuration>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

excludeScope won't work because excluding test aborts the build and excludes all possible scopes. Instead the included scope needs to be adjusted.

Documentation says: The scopes being interpreted are the scopes as Maven sees them, not as specified in the pom.

In summary:
  * runtime scope gives runtime and compile dependencies
  * compile scope gives compile, provided, and system dependencies
  * test (default) scope gives all dependencies
  * provided scope just gives provided dependencies
  * system scope just gives system dependencies

According to my experience, if you just wanna run your classes with compile scoped dependencies, specified in project pom.xml file, you must add -DincludeScope=runtime java system setting, like so:

mvn compile dependency:copy-dependencies -DincludeScope=runtime
java -cp "target/dependecy/*:target/classes" com.example.Main args...

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Regards

It is not clear if you wanted to exclude jars with test scope or test related jars (test classifier). In either case, there are two properties of dependency:copy-dependencies which can help you.

• excludeClassifiers Comma Separated list of Classifiers to exclude. Empty String indicates don't exclude anything (default).
• excludeScope Scope to exclude. An Empty string indicates no scopes (default).