How do I get Maven to use the correct repositories

Answer by romaintaz in stockoverflow..

By default, Maven will always look in the official Maven repository, which is http://repo1.maven.org.

When Maven tries to build a project, it will look in your local repository (by default ~/.m2/repository but you can configure it by changing the <localRepository> value in your ~/.m2/settings.xml) to find any dependency, plugin or report defined in your pom.xml. If the adequate artifact is not found in your local repository, it will look in all external repositories configured, starting with the default one, http://repo1.maven.org.

You can configure Maven to avoid this default repository by setting a mirror in your settings.xml file:

<mirrors>
    <mirror>
        <id>repoMirror</id>
        <name>Our mirror for Maven repository</name>
        <url>http://the/server/</url>
        <mirrorOf>*</mirrorOf>
    </mirror>
</mirrors>

This way, instead of contacting http://repo1.maven.org, Maven will contact your entreprise repository (http://the/server in this example).

If you want to add another repository, you can define a new one in your settings.xml file:

<profiles>
    <profile>
        <activation>
            <activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>
        </activation>
        <repositories>
            <repository>
                <id>foo.bar</id>
                <releases>
                    <enabled>true</enabled>
                </releases>
                <snapshots>
                    <enabled>true</enabled>
                </snapshots>
                <url>http://new/repository/server</url>
            </repository>
        </repositories>

You can see the complete settings.xml model here.

Concerning the clean process, you can ask Maven to run it offline. In this case, Maven will not try to reach any external repositories: