mcs (Maven Central Search)

Maven Central Search, or mcs for short, is a small CLI to query Maven Central from your command line. No more switching to the web browser! Now you can easily query Maven Central and find the library you’re looking for.

Usage

mcs supports the following ways of searching:

  1. Wildcard search
    mcs search picocli
    This will give you all artifacts in Maven Central that have “picocli” in their name. The output is in a tabular form, showing the exact coordinate of each artifact and the moment when its latest version was deployed.
  2. Coordinate search
    mcs search info:picocli
mcs search info:picocli:4.6.2
    If there are multiple hits, you will get the same table output as above. But if there’s only one hit, this will give you a pom.xml snippet for the artifact you searched for. Ready for copy & paste in your favourite IDE!
  3. Class-name search
    mcs class-search CommandLine
mcs class-search -f picocli.CommandLine
    This will give you all artifacts in Maven Central that contain a particular class. If you set the -f flag, the search term is considered a “fully classified” class name, so including the package name.

All modi recognise the -l <number> switch, which lets you specify how many results you want to see at most.

Getting mcs

You can get your copy of mcs through a range of package managers and distribution channels:

Package managerPlatformInstallationRemarks
Homebrew🍎 🐧brew install mthmulders/tap/mcs⚠️ 1
Snap🐧snap install maven-central-search
SDKMAN!🍎 🐧sdk install mcs
Chocolatey🪟choco install mcs
  1. The macOS and Linux binaries only work on x86_64 CPU’s. If you have a Mac with Apple Silicon, you can use mcs through Rosetta.

Alternatively, you can browse the code on GitHub.

History

mcs started out as a small pet project to experiment with picocli. I choose Java 17 so I could gain some experience with the latest additions to the Java programming language. Later, I’ve added GraalVM for building native images rather than JAR distributions.

Acknowledgements