Given a Maven GAV coordinate, Dropship will resolve and download all dependencies from local and remote maven repositories.

This library utilizes Sonatype Aether, the library used by Maven to deal with repositories. Aether does all of the heavy lifting, this library aims to be a lightweight shim on top of it to help reduce the friction for a majority of potential uses.

Until this is put into a maven repo, download source and build a .jar with Maven: mvn clean install

Add the following to your pom.xml:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.github.smreed</groupId>
    <artifactId>dropship</artifactId>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
</dependency>

You Can Create a ClassLoader:

ClassLoader classLoader = MavenClassloader.forGAV("junit:junit:4.8.1");

You're done! Assuming you wanted the classloader for a reason, such as loading a class, you just use normal reflection:

Class<?> junitAssertClass = classLoader.loadClass("org.junit.Assert");

Stop pushing artifacts into production, use Dropship to pull them down from a maven repository and run your code! Dropship automatically creates a classpath containing all of your project's dependencies and will run the public static void main(String[]) method of a class you specify!

java -cp dropship-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar com.github.smreed.dropship.Dropship mygroup:myartifact[:myversion] mygroup.myartifact.Main arg1 arg2...

If you omit the version, Dropship will automatically run the latest version of your artifact.

If you need to manage versions of multiple artifacts, then use dropship.properties to map them.

#dropship.properties
repo.remote.url = http:https://some-other-repo/
repo.local.path = /tmp

dropship.additional.paths = /tmp/resources

# You can leave older entries, they will be ignored and you can use this as a deploy log
# 2012-12-23
mygroup.myartifact = 1.0

# 2012-12-24
mygroup.myartifact = 1.1