How to generate report to list unused dependencies in Maven

In this post, we will see how to generate a report to list the unused dependencies of a Java project built using Maven.

We will use the dependency plugin to do so. Let's use the dependency:analyze-report goal as below

mvn dependency:analyze-report -DignoreNonCompile=true

This will basically generate an HTML report containing the list of dependencies with the following classification :

• used and declared.
• used and undeclared.
• unused and declared.

Ideally, it's always a good idea to cleanup the pom's by removing and/or commenting the unused but declared dependencies.