coursier Java API

coursier can be used from pure Java projects, but also from Scala projects, via its Java API.

The coursier Java API used to be handled from an external repository, but its sources now live in this repository, under modules/interface. It keeps its own versioning scheme, unrelated to the one of the other coursier modules, and driven by the interface-v* tags of this repository (rather than the v* ones).

It is published as io.get-coursier:interface, and aims at minimizing binary compatibility breakages - it basically never broke binary compatibility since its very first release (but for one borked release).

It only depends on slf4j-api. Most notably, it doesn't depend on the Scala standard library or any other Scala project. coursier being written in Scala, this is achieved by shading / proguarding all coursier dependencies. This results in a slightly heavy JAR, that embeds under the coursierapi.shaded most coursier dependencies. Note that users shouldn't tap directly into the APIs under coursierapi.shaded - these are considered private, and no compatibility guarantees apply to those.

Even though coursier and its dependencies are shaded, the environment variables and Java properties that coursier reads are left untouched. That is COURSIER_REPOSITORIES / coursier.repositories, COURSIER_CACHE / coursier.cache, etc. are read by the Java API just like they are by coursier itself.