One solution is to use <dependencies> element: <container> <containerId>jetty4xEmbedded</containerId> <dependencies> <dependency> <groupId/> <artifactId/> </dependency> </dependencies> Dependencies would need to be defined in the normal place in the pom and referenced inside the <container> element. We could also decide to always include any dependencies defined with scope compile, runtime but I'm not sure this would work in all cases...