IntelliJ – External library recognized but build fails

I’ve been recently trying to build a Java project which looks as follows:

./someProject
./libForSomeProject

in ./someProject, I’m importing an interface and a class from ./libForSomeProject. I learned recently that in IntelliJ, one can make ./someProject aware of the ./libForSomeProject by adding it as an external library (project structure -> libraries etc.). Indeed, when I do this, the IDE seems to recognize the classes from ./libForSomeProject. However, when trying to build, it says that it could not find the libForSomeProject. Not sure what I’m doing wrong, as the classes seem to get recognized – if I’m not importing the ./libForSomeProject, they are “red” and marked as unknown (as they should be), so something is definitely being imported, but the build fails. Anyone seen something similar?

Thanks

Answer

One can put a library into the local maven repository, and then only use a maven dependency instead of adding it to IntelliJ IDEA’s libraries. Which is an other mechanism than maven’s.

For every IDE one must distinguish on its “native” conceived build/library handling and the way a build infrastructure like maven or gradle handle libraries aka dependencies.