javac package not found or does not exist

Question

I have a project written in Java 12 (fairly new to java9+ and using modules) and I want to use jlink to create a custom runtime image. I also want to use apache.commons.cli as a 3rd party library for my project. How can I make use of automatic modules and compile in order to create a jlink image?

I am getting errors like so:

tmp\commons.cli\module-info.java:3: error: package is empty or does not exist: org.apache.commons.cli exports org.apache.commons.cli; ^ 1 error

My structure is as follows:

C:. ├───.settings ├───bin │ └───com │ └───ngdesk ├───src │ ├───com │ │ └───ngdesk │ └───out └───target ├───classes │ ├───com │ │ └───ngdesk │ ├───META-INF │ │ └───maven │ │ └───ngDesk-ControlApp │ │ └───ngDesk-ControlApp │ └───out └───test-classes