Index

Find any class in any jar — project dependencies or ~/.m2.

The index goal builds lightweight manifests for dependency jars. Each manifest lists every class name and resource path — enough to answer “which jar has this class?” in milliseconds.

Two-Tier Architecture

Jackknife uses a deliberate two-tier design:

1. Manifest (sub-second, all jars) — reads the zip directory only. No decompression, no bytecode parsing. This is why mvn jackknife:index is instant even on large classpaths.

2. Full decompile (3-5s per jar, on demand) — Vineflower decompiles the entire jar into individual .java files. One-time cost per jar, then cached as direct file reads.

The manifest answers “where is this class?” The decompile step answers “what does it do?”

Quick Start

mvn jackknife:index

This creates .jackknife/manifest/ with one manifest file per dependency jar.

Search with Grep:

Grep "ObjectMapper" .jackknife/manifest/

• Project Dependencies
  Index all dependencies in your Maven project.
• Repository Search
  Find any class in ~/.m2/repository by name — no shell commands needed.
• Broad Search
  Index multiple jars by pattern across your entire local repository.
• Manifest Format
  What's in a manifest file and how to search them.