include eclipse library in maven build

Question

simple scenario:

I have a maven project, containing some maven dependencies (activiti framework) and added the Widlfly 8.1.0 runtime as library in eclipse.

naturally now, if i clean and build with MAVEN, maven won't consider the runtime while compiling and complain that it cannot find eg. the @Webservlet Annotation, HttpRequest classes etc.

so in order to build my Project, i have to run any maven goal and see it fail, just to have maven download all dependencies, then build the project with eclipses' build process which then uses all downloaded maven dependencies AND the wildfly 8.1.0 runtime, succeeding in building the project.

THEN only can I run maven install/deploy to create the .war, which works, because maven finds a compiled target folder, created by eclipse.

How can i, without instlalling all runtime jars to my local repository or adding the wildfly installation as antoher local repo, tell maven or the m2e plugin to include manually added libraries to mavens compile step?

Answer 1

what you probably want is a "provided"*-scope dependency on org.wildfly:wildfly-spec-api:8.1.0 (which is a pom artifact containing all the apis/specifications provided to you by wildfly).

assumming you intend to deploy your app inside wildfly (as opposed to embedding wildfly in your own main() somehow...) you dont need a dependency on the wildfly container.

* - note that since wildfly-apec-api is a pom artifact (and not a jar) you need to use the import scope and not provided. see this article for a complete guide. the gist is you put an import scope dependency on the pom in dependency management, and then you can put a provided-scope dependency on any specific member api/spec that you use (say ejb3, jsf, bean validation or jpa) and the versions will be taken from the spec-api pom.