Determining updates to Maven dependencies

We use a number of third-party libraries to build our projects. As you recall, we specify the groupId, artifactId, and version elements of each of these dependant libraries in our pom file. There may be many occasions when there are updates to these libraries and new versions are released. It will be good to have a mechanism to get notified about these releases and update the project build file suitably.

How to do it...

1. Take a project for which you want to check for a dependency update, simple-project, which we had created using the quick-start archetype.
2. Run the following command:

   mvn versions:display-dependency-updates
   

3. Observe the output:

   [INFO] --- versions-maven-plugin:2.1:display-dependency-updates (default-cli) @
   simple-project ---
   [INFO] artifact junit:junit: checking for updates from central
   [INFO] The following dependencies in Dependencies have newer versions:
   [INFO]   junit:junit ............................................ 3.8.1 -> 4.12...