How to exclude a dependency from parent's project in Maven?

Question

For example, I have 2 Maven projects. One is "project-parent". The other is "project-child". Obviously, "project-child" is the sub project of "project-parent".

"project-parent" has a dependency of log4j. But I want to exclude it from the "project-child". Is there a way?

You might say I should move log4j from "project-parent" to "project-child". That is totally correct. But the assumption is I CANNOT modify "project-parent"'s POM.

Thanks in advance.

score 14 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 26 '11 at 03:51

14

I think in Maven2 there is no way to achieve this, because this is what POM inheritance is for . However there is one trick that I can think of:

Assume you have the right to upload artifact to your internal artifact repository. You may create an empty JAR, deploy it as log4j:log4j, with a obviously abnormal version (e.g. log4j:log4j:9999 ). Add such dependency in your project-child. Then it will override the dependency of parent to depends on a in-fact-empty JAR.

answered Oct 26 '11 at 03:51

Adrian Shum

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A side note: someone is doing similar thing and provided a public repository for such kind of "empty" artifacts (http://version99.qos.ch/). They use `99-empty` as the version. People consider the approach suggested by me may use this as convention. – Adrian Shum Mar 30 '15 at 09:28

score 13 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:02

I don't know of a way of actually excluding a dependency, but you can exclude it from the target distribution, but it's a bit of a hack. You need to change the scope of the dependency to something that you can exclude in the final distribution.

So, say that my parent had a dependency on junit 4.8, in my pom you say:

<dependency>
    <groupId>junit</groupId>
    <artifactId>junit</artifactId>
    <version>4.8</version>
    <scope>provided</scope>
</dependency>

So we're changing the scope to provided. For an explanation of how this works, see my answer to NoClassDefFoundError: org/junit/AfterClass during annotation processing. Unfortunately, this doesn't affect the build, but when you're copying the dependencies for the final distribution, you can use the excludeScope configuration element to not copy the dependency into the final distribution:

<plugin>
<artifactId>maven-dependency-plugin</artifactId>

<executions>
    <execution>
        <id>copy-libs</id>
        <phase>package</phase>
        <goals>
            <goal>copy-dependencies</goal>
        </goals>
        <configuration>
            <outputDirectory>${project.build.directory}/lib</outputDirectory>
            <excludeScope>provided</excludeScope>
        </configuration>
    </execution>

Thanks. I have excluded the unwanted dependencies from distribution package, but I am using in assembly.xml of Maven Assembly plugin for it. I am asking for a way to exclude unwanted dependencies from dev environment, like Eclipse. :) — Smartmarkey, Oct 27 '11 at 05:36

score 4 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 19 '17 at 10:10

I have met the same question just like you. In my project, let call the parent pom is parent.pom. parent defined the log4j, slf4j like this:

       <dependency>
            <groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
            <artifactId>slf4j-api</artifactId>
            <version>${slf4j-api.version}</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>log4j</groupId>
            <artifactId>log4j</artifactId>
            <version>${log4j.version}</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
            <artifactId>jcl-over-slf4j</artifactId>
            <version>${slf4j-api.version}</version>
        </dependency>

        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
            <artifactId>slf4j-log4j12</artifactId>
            <version>${slf4j-log4j12.version}</version>
        </dependency>

child project invoke some dependency in child.pom. But I don't want the log4j-1.2.x dependency and want to increase the version of slf4j.

So. I add the dependency of parent

<dependency>
        <groupId>parent</groupId>
        <artifactId>myartifactId</artifactId>
        <version>${my parent version}</version>
</dependency>

and use exclusions to remove the log4j

<dependency>
        <groupId>parent</groupId>
        <artifactId>myartifactId</artifactId>
        <version>${my parent version}</version>
        <exclusions>
            <exclusion>
                <groupId>log4j</groupId>
                <artifactId>log4j</artifactId>
            </exclusion>
        </exclusions>
</dependency>

and explicitly add the slf4j and log4j2's dependency in child pom

 <dependency>
        <groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
        <artifactId>slf4j-api</artifactId>
        <version>1.7.6</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.apache.logging.log4j</groupId>
        <artifactId>log4j-slf4j-impl</artifactId>
        <version>2.8.2</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.apache.logging.log4j</groupId>
        <artifactId>log4j-api</artifactId>
        <version>2.8.2</version>
    </dependency>

    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.apache.logging.log4j</groupId>
        <artifactId>log4j-core</artifactId>
        <version>2.8.2</version>
    </dependency>

    <dependency>
        <groupId>com.lmax</groupId>
        <artifactId>disruptor</artifactId>
        <version>3.3.4</version>
    </dependency>

then use mvn dependency:tree to show the dependency list, still see the log4j

[INFO] +- org.apache.kafka:kafka_2.10:jar:0.8.2.0:compile
[INFO] |  +- com.yammer.metrics:metrics-core:jar:2.2.0:compile
[INFO] |  +- org.scala-lang:scala-library:jar:2.10.4:compile
[INFO] |  +- org.apache.zookeeper:zookeeper:jar:3.4.6:compile
[INFO] |  |  +- org.slf4j:slf4j-log4j12:jar:1.7.5:compile
[INFO] |  |  +- log4j:log4j:jar:1.2.17:compile

well, let's add the exclusions on that dependency...remove this guy.

    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.apache.kafka</groupId>
        <artifactId>kafka-clients</artifactId>
        <version>0.10.1.1</version>
        <exclusions>
            <exclusion>
                <groupId>log4j</groupId>
                <artifactId>log4j</artifactId>
            </exclusion>
        </exclusions>
    </dependency>

then run the command again to check the dependency list. OK! clear~

Hope that can help you :>

i need to add tag type pom, like a parent myartifactId ${my parent version} pom log4j log4j — Israel Perales, Nov 10 '20 at 23:52
most parent are pom instead of jar. you cannot simpliy add a pom artifact in dependency tag. — Liam lin, Oct 20 '22 at 08:51

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 25 '16 at 20:33

One hacky way to accomplish this is to specify the dependency in project-child but with 'test' scope (or whatever lightest-weight scope is available). This will "hide" the scope specified in project-parent so that it is available only to test code, and unavailable to non-test code at both compile and runtime.

I came across this bug-feature mostly by mistake. In my case, my project-child had a project-sibling with a 'compile' scope dependency, while project-parent had the same dependency specified (actually inherited from a grandparent) with 'provided' scope. project-child was an executable however that depended on project-sibling, and so a NoClassDefFoundError was thrown at runtime from project-sibling since project-child's runtime classpath was being used, which didn't include the 'provided' dependency. I fixed this by moving the 'compile' dependency from project-sibling to project-parent so that the 'compile' would "hide" the 'provided'.

This is a good and clean way to achieve it if lower scope level are allowed — PatPanda, Nov 16 '20 at 01:11

score 1 · Answer 5 · answered Oct 10 '19 at 14:12

I have managed to exclude a transient dependency from a parent pom. By re-importing it in <dependencymanagement> and then setting exclusion por the dependency I wanted out. like this eg.:

<dependencyManagement>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-test</artifactId>
            <version>${spring-boot.version}</version>
            <scope>test</scope>
            <exclusions>
                <exclusion>
                    <groupId>junit</groupId>
                    <artifactId>junit</artifactId>
                </exclusion>
            </exclusions>
        </dependency>

c.sankhala · Answer 6 · 2022-06-27T06:10:18.630

find out actual base package for your unwanted dependency

mvn dependency:tree

Analyse this output and find out actual base package for your unwanted dependency

now add dependency of base package again in child pom and use exclude tag

<dependency>
    <groupId>base group id</groupId>
    <artifactId>base artifact id</artifactId>
    <version>version</version>
    <exclusions>
        <exclusion>
            <groupId>your unwanted dependency group id</groupId>
            <artifactId>your unwanted dependency artifact id</artifactId>
        </exclusion>
    </exclusions>
</dependency>

check again

mvn dependency:tree

unwanted dependency should be removed.

Gray · Answer 7 · 2011-10-26T05:35:36.270

1

If I understand the question, what you need is something like the following. It pulls in a dependency and excludes that dependency from adding to its dependency list. Often this is used if you want to inject a newer version of a package instead of the one referenced in the other package.

<dependency>
    <groupId>log4j</groupId>
    <artifactId>log4j</artifactId>
    <version>1.2.15</version>
    <exclusions>
        <exclusion>
            <groupId>com.sun.jmx</groupId>
            <artifactId>jmxri</artifactId>
        </exclusion>
        ...
    </exclusions>
    ...

If you are instead talking about a <parent> relationship then I'm not sure there is a way to do this. Can you switch from being a <parent> to a <dependency>?

edited Oct 26 '11 at 05:35

answered Oct 26 '11 at 05:25

Gray

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I mean an inherited dependency from parent project, not transitive dependency from direct dependency as your example. Anyway, thanks a lot. :) – Smartmarkey Oct 26 '11 at 05:37
Yeah, I'm not sure if you can do that. Did you see this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2681759/is-there-anyway-to-exclude-artifacts-inherited-from-a-parent-pom – Gray Oct 26 '11 at 12:15
Thanks for the link. I have read it. Looks like there is no way in Maven formally. I have to do kind of workaround. – Smartmarkey Oct 27 '11 at 05:28
1

What is the work around ? as I am also stuck in the same issue – Anuj Acharya Apr 15 '15 at 22:50

How to exclude a dependency from parent's project in Maven?

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