Maven's Versions Plugin Updates All Your Dependencies With a Single Command

It’s a good habit to use the latest versions of the dependencies you use. Not only because the updated version might contain new features or better performance (one can hope), but also because bugs are fixed and security issues are tackled. If you go about it by hand, however, updating dependencies is a boring and tedious task. Luckily for us, there is the Maven versions plugin to help us.

Check Which Dependencies/Plugins/Properties Need Updating
Update Parent
Update To Latest Versions
Update a Particular Property with Bounds
Conclusion
Reference

Check Which Dependencies/Plugins/Properties Need Updating

If you need a report on which dependencies, plugins or properties used for versioning can be upgraded, run one of these:

versions:display-dependency-updates scans a project’s dependencies and produces a report of those dependencies which have newer versions available.

versions:display-plugin-updates scans a project’s plugins and produces a report of those plugins which have newer versions available, taking care of Maven version prerequisites.

versions:display-property-updates scans a project and produces a report of those properties which are used to control artifact versions and which properties have newer versions available.

Update Parent

If you have a parent section, the following command updates the version to the latest available:

$ mvn versions:update-parent

Update To Latest Versions

To upgrade all your dependencies to the latest versions, use:

$ mvn versions:use-latest-versions

Update a Particular Property with Bounds

To upgrade dependencies that get their version from the <properties> section of your POM to version that has bounds:

$ mvn versions:update-property \
    -Dproperty='cucumber.version' \
    -DnewVersion='(,4.99]'

In this case, the lower bound is unspecified (and exclusive as indicated by the () and the upper bound in 4.99 inclusive. You can tweak -DnewVersion to your liking.

Conclusion

The Maven versions plugin makes it easy for us the see which dependencies are outdated and can even update the dependencies for us with a single command. After updating, don’t forget to run your test suite and run the application to make sure nothing broke!

Reference

This has been tested on MacOS with the following Maven and versions versions:

$ mvn --version
Apache Maven 3.6.3 (cecedd343002696d0abb50b32b541b8a6ba2883f)
Maven home: /usr/local/Cellar/maven/3.6.3_1/libexec
Java version: 13.0.2, vendor: N/A, runtime: /usr/local/Cellar/openjdk/13.0.2+8_2/libexec/openjdk.jdk/Contents/Home
Default locale: en_NL, platform encoding: UTF-8
OS name: "mac os x", version: "10.15.4", arch: "x86_64", family: "mac"
$ mvn help:describe -Dplugin=versions -Dminimal | grep '^Version: '
Version: 2.7

The documentation can be found here.

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