Can Maven query the latest version of an artifact in a repo without a pom?

Question

Is there a maven command that will tell me what the latest version of an artifact is, in some remote repository?

I can update versions in pom.xml to the latest, using the versions plugin. In this case, I want to do something different. I have an archetype which is being continuously built with versions put in a repo, 1.0.1, 1.0.2, 1.0.3 and so on. I want to query what is the latest 1.0.x available from a shell script, then install and invoke the latest archetype.

I realize I could just use SNAPSHOTS and always work with the latest snapshot. It would be nice to use released versions though.

Have a look [here](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7911620/using-the-nexus-rest-api-to-get-latest-artifact-version-for-given-groupid-artifa) — OttavioMonzione, Feb 12 '16 at 14:11
Thanks. I suppose it might be better if I do it an a non-Nexus-specific way. But that is a usable answer too. — user2800708, Feb 12 '16 at 14:16

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 12 '16 at 14:09

This works, perhaps not idea since it also copies the .jar, but I can live with that if there is not a better way:

mvn org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-dependency-plugin:2.8:copy \
-DremoteRepository=ttp://legend:9005/nexus/content/groups/public \
-Dartifact=com.thesett.archetype:dropwizard_archetype:LATEST -Dpackaging=jar \
-DoutputDirectory=. 2>&1 | grep 'Copying.*dropwizard_archetype' \
| sed 's/.*dropwizard_archetype-//' | sed 's/\.jar//'

Also the above fails if the .jar is already there from a previous run - so needs a little bit of code to clean up after itself.

Can Maven query the latest version of an artifact in a repo without a pom?

1 Answers1