Maven test dependencies of dependency

Question

I have a parent project which has dependencies with scope test

    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.seleniumhq.selenium</groupId>
        <artifactId>selenium-firefox-driver</artifactId>
        <version>2.31.0</version>
        <scope>test</scope>
    </dependency>

Now I "mvn install"ed the parent project, when I include this parent project as dependency in my child project

    <dependency>
        <groupId>group</groupId>
        <artifactId>parentproject</artifactId>
        <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
    </dependency>

selenium-firefox-driver is not available. The compile scoped dependencies are available.

How can I make it available? I won't change the scope neither in the parent project nor in the child project. Because I need some classes of the parent in at runtime

Answer 1

As outlined by Charlee Chitsuk in his answer, your scope (compile in the child project) will omit the test dependencies of the included project.

A clean solution would be to separate the concerns of the parent project into two separate projects:

• parent-test: This project includes your test dependencies (e.g. selenium-firefox-driver) with a compile scope. Additionally, this project contains all of your generic test resources, e.g. JUnit base classes, in src/main/java.
• parent-business: This project contains only the business functionality of the parent project. Include parent-test here with test scope.

In your child project, you can now include parent-test with scope test as well, giving you access to its resources with the right scope.

This setup will provide a clear project structure with clean scoping, avoiding issues like you have mentioned. Yes, it's a bit more complex due to the additional project, but it's a lot cleaner as well.

Answer 2

Instead of including the parent project as dependency in your child pom, you should make the parent project as the parent of your child pom.

<parent>
   <groupId>group</groupId>
   <artifactId>parentproject</artifactId>
   <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
</parent>

You cannot call it a parent project otherwise.