Getting Oracle JDBC Drivers through Maven

2019 March 21

Oracles JDBC drivers are infamous for not being in the Maven Central Repository. What is less known is that there is an Oracle Maven Repository or how to use this Maven repository. This article describes how to do use the Oracle Maven Repository to get the Oracle JDBC drivers for a developer setup. In a corporate setup we would use a repository manager like Nexus or Artifactory.

The first thing we need is an Oracle OTN account, we will need this to download most Oracle software. We are going to use Maven Password Encryption to store our OTN password. This isn’t strictly necessary and the setup is simpler without it but it is good practice.

Next, if not already done, we create a Maven master password

mvn --encrypt-master-password <maven-master-password>

where <maven-master-password> is replaced with our Maven master password. We take the output of that and paste it into ${HOME}/.m2/settings-security.xml

<settingsSecurity>
  <master>{jSMOWnoPFgsHVpMvz5VrIt5kRbzGpI8u+9EF1iFQyJQ=}</master>
</settingsSecurity>

where {jSMOWnoPFgsHVpMvz5VrIt5kRbzGpI8u+9EF1iFQyJQ=} is replaced with the output of creating the Maven password. Then we encrypt our OTN password with

mvn --encrypt-password <otn-password>

where <otn-password> is replaced with our OTN password. We take the output of that and paste it into ${HOME}/.m2/settings.xml

<settings>

  <!-- ... -->
  <servers>
    <server>
      <id>maven.oracle.com</id>
      <username>scott@oracle.com</username>
      <password>{COQLCE6DU6GtcS5P=}</password>
      <configuration>
        <basicAuthScope>
          <host>ANY</host>
          <port>ANY</port>
          <realm>OAM 11g</realm>
        </basicAuthScope>
        <httpConfiguration>
          <all>
            <params>
              <property>
                <name>http.protocol.allow-circular-redirects</name>
                <value>%b,true</value>
              </property>
            </params>
          </all>
        </httpConfiguration>
      </configuration>
    </server>
  </servers>

  <profiles>
    <profile>
      <id>download-from-oracle</id>
      <activation>
        <activeByDefault>false</activeByDefault>
      </activation>
      <repositories>
        <repository>
          <id>maven.oracle.com</id>
          <url>https://maven.oracle.com</url>
          <layout>default</layout>
          <releases>
            <enabled>true</enabled>
          </releases>
        </repository>
      </repositories>
    </profile>
  </profiles>

</settings>

where {COQLCE6DU6GtcS5P=} is the output of encrypting our OTN password and scott@oracle.com is replaced with our OTN login.

This sets up a download-from-oracle profile that is available in all our local Maven projects. The profile adds the Oracle Maven repository but not by default. This has the following advantages. First we don’t have to add a <repository> to our projects pom.xml. Adding a <repository> to our pom.xml is not recommended. Second the Oracle Maven repository is only used when we explicitly ask for it:

mvn dependency:resolve -Pdownload-from-oracle

And with that we can use the Oracle divers from Maven using

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.oracle.jdbc</groupId>
  <artifactId>ojdbc8</artifactId>
  <version>18.3.0.0</version>
</dependency>

Update

Oracle JDBC drivers are now in Maven Central under the com.oracle.ojdbc groupId.

Getting Oracle JDBC Drivers through Maven

Update

Further Reading