After mvn install I dont see jars in External Libraries

This is my first time working with maven on production. And I am struggling. We are using maven modules and lets say I have two modules

• frontend
• backend

Where, frontend is using some of backend classes, so we have dependencies from frontend project to backend project.
So what I am doing when building with maven is running mvn install to build and copy backend and frontend jars to local repository. And it is working correctly, everything is passing and newly created jars are located in .m2 directory.

But even so, Intellij does not see this dependencies. And in frontend project, when I am using backend class it is telling me that this class is not found. In addition in External Libraries tab I cant find this jar.

Any idea what is wrong?

You should open/import the project as a maven project.

If you are fetching the project from an online repository (svn/git) you can use JIdea built in tools for this.

New -> Project from Version Control

After adding the project do a complete mvn clean install, this should get you going if the pom.xml files are having required dependencies listed.

At any point of time, if you need to reload the dependencies you can use maven reimport.

You can enable a side bar for maven project by going into, View -> Tool Windows -> maven

In Maven, you can use Apache Maven Dependency Plugin, goal dependency:purge-local-repository to remove the project dependencies from the local repository, and re-download it again,
mvn dependency:purge-local-repository

Read more about working with module dependencies here