Sort maven dependencies in Eclipse

Just wanted to know if it is possible in Eclipse to sort Maven dependencies by alphabetical order?

It's bothering me to have a list of 200 jars not ordered... :(

Finally it is possible with Eclipse Photon now.

Just tick the checkbox Sort library entries alphabetically in Package Explorer under Preferences → Java → Appearance

See also here under 'Sort library entries alphabetically in Package Explorer'.

Unfortunately theres a bug, at least for me, that the source folders are also reordered, see here.

I guess you refer to the m2eclipse plugin. You have these options:

1. The order in the navigator is the classpath order. You can sort the dependencies in the POM to get a better list. Of course, there is a problem with transient dependencies.

2. You can open the POM file in the POM editor and examine the dependencies in the tab "Dependency Hierarchy"

3. You can type part of the name of a dependency to locate it when the tree item "Maven Dependencies" is open.

Maven's Pom viewer will do the trick:

Double-click the pom.xml you care about. Eclipse opens it in a special viewer with five tabs on the bottom: Overview, Dependencies, Dependency Hierarchy, Effective POM, and pom.xml.

Click Dependency Hierarchy. You should see the following on the right side of the view:

It's alphabetized.

I just ran into the Sortpom Maven Plugin. This enables you to sort the dependencies in your pom using a Maven command. So you can use it in Eclipse, but also in any other IDE (I'm using NetBeans where you can configure it as custom goal definition).

Simply run:

mvn com.github.ekryd.sortpom:sortpom-maven-plugin:sort -Dsort.sortDependencies=groupId,artifactId

At the GitHub wiki you can find all parameters.

But as pointed out in the comments, sorting like this isn't a good idea. Let your IDE take care of it. NetBeans has a "Dependencies" folder in a project where the dependencies are shown sorted by default (first by type, then by name).

have a look at the project properties in the 'java build path' section under the 'libraries' tab.

i don't know for sure if this works for the m2eclipse plugin.

I had an issue where Sort library entries alphabetically in Package Explorer under Preferences → Java → Appearance was checked, but the dependencies were still unsorted.

Right clicking the library path and clicking Show in -> System Explorer fixed the issue for me.

It worked for me when I used the Java perspective instead of the Java EE perspective. On my computer, the dependencies were not sorted in the Java EE perspective, also not when I checked the checkbox in Java | Appearance. I had to choose the Java perspective instead. Then the checkbox did work and I could have sorted dependencies.