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When installing PDFBox with Maven, it places the libraries in the ~/.m2/repository directory.

My program complies fine with mvn package .

When I try to run it with

java -cp target/java-project-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar com.example.sub.App
then I get 
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/pdfbox/pdmodel/PDDocument
Should I also be specifying the libraries in ~/.m2/repository as part of the classpath? This seems a bit too tedious to do it this way. What is the recommended way to specify the classpath of my PDFBox library while using the library location(s) of Maven?
                I just them in the lib subdir and add that one to the classpath but I don't know if it is best practice.
– Tilman Hausherr
                Mar 24, 2019 at 20:24
I wasn't able to find a nice solution with leaving the JAR files in ~/.m2, so the answer below is a workaround based on some other answers. I will be including more clarification though for those who are new to both PDFBox and maven as I am.
1) Add the following to your pom.xml file. If you already have a <build> and <plugins> section, just add the <plugin> section below to that. Otherwise you may need to add the whole code below within the <project> element:
  <build>
      <plugins>
          <plugin>
              <artifactId>maven-assembly-plugin</artifactId>
              <configuration>
                  <archive>
                      <manifest>
                          <addClasspath>true</addClasspath>
                          <mainClass>**REPLACE THIS WITH THE FULL URI OF YOUR MAIN CLASS**</mainClass>
                      </manifest>
                  </archive>
                  <descriptorRefs>
                      <descriptorRef>jar-with-dependencies</descriptorRef>
                  </descriptorRefs>
              </configuration>
              <executions>
                  <execution>
                      <id>make-my-jar-with-dependencies</id>
                      <phase>package</phase>
                      <goals>
                          <goal>single</goal>
                      </goals>
                  </execution>
              </executions>
          </plugin>
      </plugins>
  </build>
2) Make sure that you replace the text in the <mainClass> element to match the situation. For example, if your main() method is located in an App class in App.js, and your package name is com.example.sub. Then the above element should read:
<mainClass>com.example.sub.App</mainClass>
3) To compile your app, run mvn package
Note: I have seen some references online using mvn clean compile assembly:single instead of mvn package. I am not sure what the purpose of this is when mvn package seems to run just fine for me. 
This will take your project and all of your dependencies and create a single JAR file in the target directory called something like this:
java-project-1.0-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar
4) To run the project you can do this:
java -cp target/java-project-1.0-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar com.example.sub.App
Make sure that you modify the above line to it your situation. In other words you may need to change both the name of the jar file and the name of the URI for your main class.
        
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