Get Maven artifact version at runtime

I have noticed that in a Maven artifact's JAR, the project.version attribute is included in two files:

META-INF/maven/${groupId}/${artifactId}/pom.properties
META-INF/maven/${groupId}/${artifactId}/pom.xml

Is there a recommended way to read this version at runtime?

Solution 1:

You should not need to access Maven-specific files to get the version information of any given library/class.

You can simply use getClass().getPackage().getImplementationVersion() to get the version information that is stored in a .jar-files MANIFEST.MF. Luckily Maven is smart enough Unfortunately Maven does not write the correct information to the manifest as well by default!

Instead one has to modify the <archive> configuration element of the maven-jar-plugin to set addDefaultImplementationEntries and addDefaultSpecificationEntries to true, like this:

<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>

Ideally this configuration should be put into the company pom or another base-pom.

Detailed documentation of the <archive> element can be found in the Maven Archive documentation.

Solution 2:

To follow up the answer above, for a .war artifact, I found I had to apply the equivalent configuration to maven-war-plugin, rather than maven-jar-plugin:

<plugin>
    <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.1</version>
    <configuration>
        <archive>                   
            <manifest>
                <addDefaultImplementationEntries>true</addDefaultImplementationEntries>
                <addDefaultSpecificationEntries>true</addDefaultSpecificationEntries>
            </manifest>
        </archive>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

This added the version information to MANIFEST.MF in the project's .jar (included in WEB-INF/lib of the .war)

Solution 3:

Here's a method for getting the version from the pom.properties, falling back to getting it from the manifest

public synchronized String getVersion() {
    String version = null;

    // try to load from maven properties first
    try {
        Properties p = new Properties();
        InputStream is = getClass().getResourceAsStream("/META-INF/maven/com.my.group/my-artefact/pom.properties");
        if (is != null) {
            p.load(is);
            version = p.getProperty("version", "");
        }
    } catch (Exception e) {
        // ignore
    }

    // fallback to using Java API
    if (version == null) {
        Package aPackage = getClass().getPackage();
        if (aPackage != null) {
            version = aPackage.getImplementationVersion();
            if (version == null) {
                version = aPackage.getSpecificationVersion();
            }
        }
    }

    if (version == null) {
        // we could not compute the version so use a blank
        version = "";
    }

    return version;
}