Apache Ivy

Almost all Java projects, apart from the most trivial ones have dependencies. These dependencies could either be on other projects or third-party libraries. Managing these dependencies can be extremely time-consuming and distracting from the primary focus of the project. Apache Ivy is a tool for managing library dependencies. Ivy neatly fills the gap by providing an easily configurable and automated dependency management system. Further, Ivy supports transitive dependencies management. Hence all we need to do is declare our main dependencies and Ivy automatically fetches all the sub dependencies along with the main dependencies from a public location such as the Maven 2 repository.

Installation

Ivy is designed to work with Ant, wherein Ant is used to run the build tasks and Ivy is used to resolve, retrieve and manage the dependencies. The simplest way to get started is to copy the Ivy jar file to the Ant lib (ANT_HOME/lib) directory.

Configure ivy.xml

The ivy.xml configuration file is the main file that is used to describe our dependencies. Below is an example of a configuration file that states two main dependencies, Hibernate and the C3P0 library.

<ivy-module version="2.0">
    <info organisation="techvj" module="ivy-test" />
    <dependencies>
        <dependency org="org.hibernate" name="hibernate" rev="3.2.6.ga" />
        <dependency org="c3p0" name="c3p0" rev="0.9.1.2" />
    </dependencies>
</ivy-module>

Integrate With Ant

The final step is to integrate the Ivy dependency resolution process with our Ant build process. Following is an example of a build.xml file with the retrieve task defined:

<project xmlns:ivy="antlib:org.apache.ivy.ant" name="hello-ivy" default="retrieve">
    ...
    <target name="retrieve" description="">
        <ivy:retrieve />
    </target>
</project>

On running the above Ant build, Ivy retrieves the Hibernate and C3P0 libraries and all of their dependencies to the local machine. The retrieved libraries are stored in a cache and not downloaded again on successive invocations. Apache Ivy is a great tool in a Java developer's toolbox for managing library dependencies.