Extracting a Maven Artifact Version from the Command Line

As part of ongoing maintenance and releases to application servers, I needed a quick way to determine the versions of various components to check if they were up to date or not.

Ideally what I was after was a shell command I could run against one or more components to extract version information, as ultimately this check would likely be run via an SSH session from a central management host.

This one-liner can do what I needed:

$ unzip -p component.jar 'META-INF/maven/*/pom.properties' | grep '^version=' | cut -d '=' -f 2
0.1.5-SNAPSHOT

Note that this may return more than one version number if the component is a fat or shaded jar file. If you at least know some of the groupId you can be more specific in the file path to extract the version from. The pom.properties file is always located in META-INF/maven/<groupId>/<artifactId>/pom.properties.

unzip -p component.jar 'META-INF/maven/com.devwithimagination*/*/pom.properties'