How do I make use of a third-party java library github project?

Question

When there's no obvious compiled jars provided on a github project page, I've been downloading the clear code and kludging them into subdirectories in my codebase to make use of third party code (or, most of the time, just not using the code at all). I know that's not the right way to go about this; what is?

There's a popular post about importing github projects into Eclipse: Importing a GitHub project into Eclipse ...and I've recently learned how to make my own projects depend on one another. Is this the practice, then, to fill up your workspace with projects you're not actually going to work on, so that you can declare dependencies? I remember making dependency references to web resources in the past (itch.io, maybe?) in some configuration, where I didn't have to go download the code. Is there a more elegant solution like that for github?

I'm using Eclipse, and the current library I'd like to use is: https://github.com/FasterXML/jackson

Answer 1

If you're trying to just use FasterXML, the jars are hosted on MvnRepository as well as a lot of other projects.

If a github project's artifact isn't available on MvnRepository or some other online repository you could potentially clone, build the war/jar file yourself, and then manually import it into your project instead of copy and pasting code directly into your project. This would give you access to the library.