Maven Global Excludes

To my knowledge, maven2 currently does not have the ability to globally exclude dependencies. Instead there is the tedius way of excluding a transitive dependency inline with the direct dependency (see Conflict Resolution) For complex multi-module projects, this can be difficult to manage and having the ability to exclude a dependency globally could be very useful. Seems like others share the same feelings (MNG-3196). Unfortunately, for maven2 users this is targeted for maven3. So until then, here is a tip on how to globally exclude dependencies in your project (provided by my co-worker Ron Alleva).

To globally exclude a dependency all you need to do is set the dependencies scope value to provided. This supports excluding transitive dependencies, which is really what you want.

So for example, let's assume I have a WAR project that depends on commons-logging-1.1, which according to "mvn dependency:tree" has a transitive dependency on avalon-framework-4.1.3.

[INFO] +- commons-logging:commons-logging:jar:1.1:compile
[INFO] |  +- logkit:logkit:jar:1.0.1:compile
[INFO] |  \- avalon-framework:avalon-framework:jar:4.1.3:compile

Assuming I want to exclude avalon-framework from my WAR, I would add the following to my projects POM with a scope of provided. This works across all transitive dependencies and allows you to specify it once.

<dependencies>
  <dependency>
      <artifactId>avalon-framework</artifactId>
      <groupId>avalon-framework</groupId>
      <version>4.1.3</version>
      <scope>provided</scope>
  </dependency>
</dependencies>

This even works when specifying it in the parent POM, which would prevent projects from having to declare this in all child POMs.