It took some effort and luck but I got it. Set up a directory as a local repository, installed the jars there. On mvn clean install, they get transferred into .m2/repository. Have to define the dependency in the parent, which I didn't want to have to, but it's the only way to get this going. Also have to build the whole project or none of it will work. It's not pretty but it's also temporary.For those of you who work with Java and Maven, is there a way to use relative paths to set up a system scope dependency? I basically have a few dozen modules that rely on similar jars. The jars are in a folder at the same level as the modules and I want Maven to point there rather than having to duplicate the jars multiple times. OR if there's a way to create a jar that contains those jars. I tried yesterday, got things packaged into a larger jar, but Maven didn't seem to recognize everything was bundled in there. I saw the Shade plugin but it expanded everything but my system scope jars.