Accessing An Artifact’s Maven And SCM Versions At Runtime

Jakub HolyMay 27th, 2013Last Updated: May 27th, 2013

0 25 1 minute read

You can easily tell Maven to include the version of the artifact and its Git/SVN/… revision in the JAR manifest file and then access that information at runtime via getClass().getPackage.getImplementationVersion(). (All credit goes to Markus Krüger and other colleagues.)

Include Maven artifact version in the manifest

(Note: You will actually not want to use it, if you also want to include a SCM revision; see below.)

pom.xml:

<project>
  ...
  <build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-jar-plugin</artifactId>
        ...
        <configuration>
          <archive>
            <manifest>
              <addDefaultImplementationEntries>true</addDefaultImplementationEntries>
              <addDefaultSpecificationEntries>true</addDefaultSpecificationEntries>
            </manifest>
          </archive>
        </configuration>
        ...
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>
  ...
</project>

The resulting MANIFEST.MF of the JAR file will then include the following entries, with values from the indicated properties:

Built-By: ${user.name}
Build-Jdk: ${java.version}
Specification-Title: ${project.name}
Specification-Version: ${project.version}
Specification-Vendor: ${project.organization.name
Implementation-Title: ${project.name}
Implementation-Version: ${project.version}
Implementation-Vendor-Id: ${project.groupId}
Implementation-Vendor: ${project.organization.name}

(Specification-Vendor and Implementation-Vendor come from the POM’s organization/name.)

Include SCM revision

For this you can either use the Build Number Maven plugin that produces the property ${buildNumber}, or retrieve it from environment variables passed by Jenkins or Hudson (SVN_REVISION for Subversion, GIT_COMMIT for Git).

For git alone, you could also use the maven-git-commit-id-plugin that can either replace strings such as ${git.commit.id} in existing resource files (using maven’s resource filtering, which you must enable) with the actual values or output all of them into a git.properties file.

Let’s use the buildnumber-maven-plugin and create the manifest entries explicitely, containing the build number (i.e. revision)

<project>
    <build>
        <plugins>
          <plugin>
                <!-- Create the property $buildNumber holding the current Git revision -->
                <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
                <artifactId>buildnumber-maven-plugin</artifactId>
                <version>1.2</version>
                <executions>
                    <execution>
                        <phase>validate</phase>
                        <goals>
                            <goal>create</goal>
                        </goals>
                    </execution>
                </executions>
                <configuration>
                    <doCheck>false</doCheck>
                    <doUpdate>false</doUpdate>
                </configuration>
            </plugin>

            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
                <artifactId>maven-jar-plugin</artifactId>
                <version>2.4</version>
                <configuration>
                    <archive>
                        <manifestEntries>
                            <Implementation-Title>${project.name}</Implementation-Title>
                            <!-- buildNumber is produced at runtime by buildnumber-maven-plugin -->
                            <Implementation-Version>${project.version} ${buildNumber}</Implementation-Version>
                        </manifestEntries>
                    </archive>
                </configuration>
            </plugin>
...