java - OSGI - handling 3rd party JARs required by a bundle

Question

I'm just getting started with OSGI development and am struggling to understand how best to handle dependant JARs.

i.e. if I'm creating a bundle the likelyhood is that I will need to use a few 3rd party JARs. When I create my bundle JAR to deploy to OSGI, obviously these 3rd party JARs are not included and thus the bundle will not run.

I understand that one option is to turn these JARs into bundles and also deploy them to the OSGI container. However if they only need to be used by the one bundle this doesn't seem ideal.

What is the best solution to this? Can the JARs be embedded within the bundle JAR and if so is this a reasonable approach?

Answer 1

You can include a third party jar inside your bundle by adding the third party jar to the root directory of the bundle jar file and then adding a bundle classpath header to the bundle's manifest, e.g.:

Bundle-ClassPath: .,my3rdparty.jar

If you want to place third party jar to subdirectory, specify the path without using heading ./, e.g

Bundle-ClassPath: .,lib/my3rdparty.jar # (not ./lib/my3rdparty.jar)