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Apache Ivy™ is a popular dependency manager focusing on flexibility and simplicity.

Ivy is a tool for managing (recording, tracking, resolving and reporting) project dependencies, characterized by flexibility, configurability, and tight integration with Apache Ant.

Features:

Apache Ivy™ is a very powerful dependency manager oriented toward Java™ dependency management, although it can be used to manage dependencies of any kind.

Integrated with Apache Ant™

Apache Ivy is integrated with Apache Ant, the most popular Java build management system, so Apache Ivy follows Apache Ant design principles. If you have Apache Ant skills, you already have Apache Ivy skills! The plugin mechanism in Apache Ivy follows the Apache Ant model. Also like Apache Ant, Apache Ivy supports macrodefs and file imports from configuration.

Since Apache Ivy is a subproject of Apache Ant, we even share the same development community!
Simple to use

For simple cases, Apache Ivy is easy to use. Declare your dependencies, and that's all. See the quick start tutorial to check yourself, it should take less than 5 minutes!

Apache Ivy brings the dependency management advantages of Apache Maven™ to Apache Ant build files, for those who already use Apache Ant and don't want to migrate to Apache Maven. But Apache Ivy does not stop there, it provides many more great features!

Clean dependency reports

Apache Ivy produces two primary report types: HTML reports and graph reports. HTML reports give a good understanding of what Apache Ivy did, and of a project's immediate dependencies. The graph reports provide a good overview of a project's transitive dependencies (see below) and conflicts.

Non intrusive

Apache Ivy is most commonly used to resolve dependencies and copy them to the lib directory of a project. After dependencies have been copied, a build no longer depends on Apache Ivy. Therefore, existing builds may easily be migrated to Apache Ivy using the lib directory pattern. Also, dependencies can be delivered with a project so that the build file need not depend on Apache Ivy.

Extremely flexible

In most cases, Apache Ivy will conform to your existing environment.

Apache Ivy comes with many default values that work out of the box, and most can be changed. For example, you can change the way Apache Ivy finds the latest dependency versions, you can change the conflict manager, you can choose if you want Apache Ivy to copy dependencies to your project libs or use them directly from the cache, etc.

Easily extensible

When Apache Ivy does not do what you want out of the box, you can often extend it to solve your problem. For instance, you can plug your own repository. But you can also define your own latest strategy and your own conflict manager. See how to extend Ivy in the reference doc.

High performance

The Apache Ivy project has always emphasized performance. For example, Apache Ivy uses a cache to avoid duplicate dependency downloads. Also, all settings and ivy files are parsed using SAX for maximum performance.

Transitive dependencies

Imagine a component that's often reused by a software team, and that this component has dependencies of its own. Without a good dependency management tool, each time this component is reused, all its dependencies must be repeated. With Apache Ivy, it's different: simply write a dependency file once for the component, and benefit from the work already done anytime this component is reused.

This model is even more powerful as the component's own dependencies change over time. In this case, without Apache Ivy, the resulting ripple effect can disrupt your project. With Apache Ivy, you update the ivy file of the component and that's it!