Nsryjdtyk

I have a plugin project which is added to other container projects as a dependency.

Now, this plugin project uses many frequent dependencies like spring-security, commons-lang, etc.

Usually, the container projects contain their own versions of such frequent dependencies. So, when we add our plugin dependency there are conflicts and the dependencies are resolved based on regular maven dependency resolver and depending on scopes and optional tags provided in the plugin project dependencies.

Is there a way where all the dependencies are resolved using the version in parent dependencies first and iff they are not available then use the version specified in plugin dependency.

Note: optional and scope runtime have a problem that these dependencies are provided by the container and thus beats the aim to provide a hassle-free single dependency to add plugin dependency.

In your plugins pom define the version of a dependency as range of the versions you know the plugin to be able to use. If a container-dependency overlaps this will be used. If no overlapping version, of the dependency both container and plugin need, can be found, an error will be produced, since the negotiation failed.
Use no special scope for the dependencies, since you want them to be included if necessary into the container,

See:

https://maven.apache.org/enforcer/enforcer-rules/versionRanges.html

And:

https://books.sonatype.com/mvnref-book/reference/pom-relationships-sect-project-dependencies.html#pom-relationships-sect-version-ranges

Assuming that your container and plugin projects use the same parent pom you could utilize the <dependencyManagement> section in the parent to define the common artifacts. This allows you to omit the version in the plugins <dependencies> section.

parent:

 <dependencyManagement>

    <dependencies>

      <dependency>

        <groupId>group-a</groupId>

        <artifactId>artifact-a</artifactId>

        <version>1.0</version>

      </dependency>

    </dependencies>

 </dependencyManagement>

plugin/module:

    <dependencies>

      <dependency>

        <groupId>group-a</groupId>

        <artifactId>artifact-a</artifactId>

      </dependency>

    </dependencies>

See https://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-dependency-mechanism.html for further details.

you can exclude it when you build a plugin project and add a dependency to maven.
This is an example. Dependency and main project have conflicted due to logging library. Below is to exclude log4j in dependency project.

<dependency>

        <groupId>org.apache.zookeeper</groupId>

        <artifactId>zookeeper</artifactId>

        <version>${zk.version}</version>

        <exclusions>

            <exclusion>

                <groupId>log4j</groupId>

                <artifactId>log4j</artifactId>

            </exclusion>

        </exclusions>

    </dependency>

P/S: Added from my comments:
I have also developed a system which has a similar architecture with yours. I separate this system into 3 main parts: 1. Commons which contains common code and required maven dependencies, 2. The main project, 3. plugin project. You can refer this.