I have not generated a fat jar manually for a long time,  because in other projects there was everything already setup or I was used to use any frameworks that freed me of such „low-level“ tasks. Recently, however, I had to generate a fat jar for a project again, i.e. a final artifact for actual deployment or for manual distribution. I had to dig deeply until I could remember half-way how to do it.

There are different maven-plugin that allow to create an executable fat jar. Basically, there are three different ways:

maven-jar-plugin

The maven-jar is a very basic plugin that enables to generate a jar. However, mostly it is not the appropriate plugin that you are looking for to generate a fat jar. Unfortunately, it does not add the maven dependencies inside the final jar. All dependencies have to be included in the classpath in some way and normally that is not what you want.

maven-assembly-plugin

This plugin adds all maven dependencies inside the final fat jar and this is probably exactly what you are looking for. All dependencies are included as jars in the final jar. In the example below, the execution of the plugin is bound to the package phase. The final executable jar will be named with a postfix „jar-with-dependencies“ which I find quite annoying. I don’t want constantly renaming the final jar.

maven-shade-plugin

The maven-shade-plugin provides probably the best way to create an executable fat jar. It adds all maven dependencies inside the final fat jar and additionally executes shading (i.e. renaming).  This plugin is bound in the example below to the package phase as well. The filters section is included to avoid any security issues not allowing to execute the jar. Avoid using jars generated in this way as maven dependency, as it is ruining the dependency resolution feature of maven. Create such jars only for the final artifact!