Few days back I was writing a Spring Roo add-on(an OSGI bundle) which required me to add some external 3rd party jars to the OSGI bundle pom.xml file. I am not very well verse with OSGI so it took me some time to figure out how to add 3rd party jars to an OSGI bundle. In this short blog post I am sharing the recipe to add third part jars.

The exception that you get when OSGI bundle is not able to find the dependency is like this.

org.osgi.framework.BundleException: Unresolved constraint com.shekhar.roo.addon [66]: Unable to resolve 66.0: missing requirement [66.0] package; (package=com.shekhar.utils)

To solve this error you need to add Embed-Dependency tag to your maven bundle plugin as shown below. The example shows that I need to add commons-io and utils jar to my OSGI bundle. To get more information about Embed-Dependency tag and maven bundle plugin please refer to the documentation.

<plugin>
	<groupId>org.apache.felix</groupId>
	<artifactId>maven-bundle-plugin</artifactId>
	<version>2.3.4</version>
	<extensions>true</extensions>
	<configuration>
		<instructions>
		<Bundle-SymbolicName>${project.artifactId}</Bundle-SymbolicName>
		<Bundle-Copyright>Copyright Shekhar Gulati. All Rights Reserved.</Bundle-Copyright>
		<Bundle-DocURL>${project.url}</Bundle-DocURL>
		utils,jsch,commons-io;scope=compile|runtime;inline=false</Embed-Dependency>
		</instructions>
		<remoteOBR>true</remoteOBR>
	</configuration>
</plugin>