JAR Runner Maven Plugin

This is a Maven plugin to execute JAR artifacts from command line. Apache Maven manages a project's build, reporting and documentation using a project object model (POM). But it's lacking support for executing artifacts from command line using a single line of code. The JAR Runner Maven Plugin aims at changing that.

Changelog | Plugin Documentation

Getting started

All you require to launch Maven artifacts is Maven itself - no POM. Then go ahead with the below example.

mvn --quiet de.lars-sh:jar-runner-maven-plugin:run -Dartifact=com.github.spotbugs:spotbugs:LATEST

Maven is executed, calls the run goal of the JAR Runner Maven Plugin, which itself resolves all dependencies of the artifact and launches the main class as described inside the JARs manifest. The Maven option --quiet simply hides away the maven-own output.

Main Class

Some JAR files do not include a proper manifest or they include multiple main classes. Therefore you can apply a custom main class.

mvn --quiet de.lars-sh:jar-runner-maven-plugin:run -Dartifact=com.puppycrawl.tools:checkstyle:LATEST -DmainClass=com.puppycrawl.tools.checkstyle.Main

Arguments

You might add a single argument as follows.

mvn --quiet de.lars-sh:jar-runner-maven-plugin:run -Dartifact=com.puppycrawl.tools:checkstyle:LATEST -DmainClass=com.puppycrawl.tools.checkstyle.Main -Darguments=--version

Use , or ],[ to separate multiple arguments from each other. Instead [,] can be used to represent an actual comma character.

Run asynchronously

Coming back to the first example you may wonder why the command line stopped working until the SpotBugs windows were closed. To handle these cases you can set the runAsync argument to true.

mvn --quiet de.lars-sh:jar-runner-maven-plugin:run -Dartifact=com.github.spotbugs:spotbugs:LATEST -DrunAsync=true

Exit code

The applications exit code is inherited. In case of success it should be zero, in case of error it should be non-zero. Checkout the following example and prove it using either echo $? (Unix) or echo %ERRORLEVEL% (Windows).

Even further

There are more arguments available. Just checkout the help goal as shown below.

mvn de.lars-sh:jar-runner-maven-plugin:help -Dgoal=run -Ddetail=true

Debugging Applications

In some cases it is useful to debug an application executed in a more production-alike runtime environment than in an IDE. Adding the following argument to a JAR Runner Maven Plugin command will open the port 8000 for remote debugging with any of the usual IDEs.

-DjavaOptions=-agentlib:jdwp=transport=dt_socket[,]server=y[,]suspend=y[,]address=8000