Maven: Creating a jar with dependencies: an example from a book does not work

Question

I am a complete newbie with Maven. I am following the Maven By Example book. In section 6.13, the author demonstrates creating a JAR with dependencies included in a command

mvn install assembly assembly 

I followed the example in chapter 6, except that I skipped the unit testing parts. I returned through them to make sure that I did not miss a step. However, when I tried the above command, I got this error output:

 [INFO] [INFO] --- maven-jar-plugin:2.3.2:jar (default-jar) @ simple-weather --- [INFO] [INFO] <<< maven-assembly-plugin:2.2-beta-5:assembly (default-cli) @ simple-weather <<< [INFO] [INFO] --- maven-assembly-plugin:2.2-beta-5:assembly (default-cli) @ simple-weather --- [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [INFO] BUILD FAILURE [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [INFO] Total time: 2.094s [INFO] Finished at: Wed Mar 21 15:53:03 EDT 2012 [INFO] Final Memory: 5M/10M [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [ERROR] Failed to execute goal org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-assembly-plugin:2.2-beta-5:assembly (default-cli) on project simple-weather: Error readi ng assemblies: No assembly descriptors found. -> [Help 1] [ERROR] [ERROR] To see the full stack trace of the errors, re-run Maven with the -e switch. [ERROR] Re-run Maven using the -X switch to enable full debug logging. [ERROR] [ERROR] For more information about the errors and possible solutions, please read the following articles: [ERROR] [Help 1] http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAVEN/MojoExecutionException C:\home\Projects\simple-weather> 

The problem is with the jar-with-dependencies descriptor in the plugins section. I worked a little with Google, but I did not find another way to do this from the book. Therefore, I would be interested to know what I'm wrong about.

Here is my pom.xml:

 <project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd"> <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion> <groupId>org.sonatype.mavenbook.custom</groupId> <artifactId>simple-weather</artifactId> <version>1.0</version> <packaging>jar</packaging> <name>simple-weather</name> <url>http://www.sonatype.com</url> <licenses> <license> <name>Apache 2</name> <url>http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.txt</url> <distribution>repo</distribution> <comments>A business-friendly OSS license</comments> </license> </licenses> <organization> <name>Sonatype</name> <url>http://www.sonatype.com</url> </organization> <developers> <developer> <id>jason</id> <name>Jason Van Zyl</name> <email> [e-mail] </email> <url>http://www.sonatype.com</url> <organization>Sonatype</organization> <organizationUrl>http://www.sonatype.com</organizationUrl> <roles> <role>developer</role> </roles> <timezone>-6</timezone> </developer> </developers> <properties> <project.build.sourceEncoding>UTF-8</project.build.sourceEncoding> </properties> <dependencies> <dependency> <groupId>log4j</groupId> <artifactId>log4j</artifactId> <version>1.2.14</version> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>dom4j</groupId> <artifactId>dom4j</artifactId> <version>1.6.1</version> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>jaxen</groupId> <artifactId>jaxen</artifactId> <version>1.1.1</version> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>velocity</groupId> <artifactId>velocity</artifactId> <version>1.5</version> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>junit</groupId> <artifactId>junit</artifactId> <version>3.8.1</version> <scope>test</scope> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId> <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId> <version>2.3.2</version> </dependency> </dependencies> <build> <plugins> <plugin> <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId> <version>2.3.2</version> <configuration> <source>1.5</source> <target>1.5</target> <descriptorRefs> <descriptorRef>jar-with-dependencies</descriptorRef> </descriptorRefs> </configuration> </plugin> </plugins> </build> </project> 

Thanks so much for any tips.

Answer 1

The problem is that your refs descriptors are configured for the compilation plugin instead of the build plugin.

Add this to the / build / plugins section

 <plugin> <artifactId>maven-assembly-plugin</artifactId> <version>2.3</version> <configuration> <descriptorRefs> <descriptorRef>jar-with-dependencies</descriptorRef> </descriptorRefs> </configuration> </plugin> 

and remove the compiler plugin configuration below as it does nothing.

 <descriptorRefs> <descriptorRef>jar-with-dependencies</descriptorRef> </descriptorRefs>