How do I force Maven to use my local repository rather than going out to remote repos to retrieve artifacts?

Question

The dependency has a snapshot version. For snapshots, Maven will check the local repository and if the artifact found in the local repository is too old, it will attempt to find an updated one in the remote repositories. That is probably what you are seeing.

Note that this behavior is controlled by the updatePolicy directive in the repository configuration (which is daily by default for snapshot repositories).

Use mvn --help and you can see the options list.

There is an option like -nsu,--no-snapshot-updates Suppress SNAPSHOT updates

So use command mvn install -nsu can force compile with local repository.

To truly force maven to only use your local repo, you can run with mvn <goals> -o. The -o tells maven to let you work "offline", and it will stay off the network.

Follow below steps:

• 1. Ensure to delete all the contents of the jar folder located in your local except the jar that you want to keep.
     For example files like .repositories, .pom, .sha1, .lastUpdated etc.
• 2. Execute mvn clean install -o command

This will help to use local repository jar files rather than connecting to any repository.

In my case I had a multi module project just like you. I had to change a group Id of one of the external libraries my project was depending on as shown below.

From:

<dependencyManagement>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.thirdparty</groupId>
        <artifactId>calculation-api</artifactId>
        <version>2.0</version>
        <type>jar</type>
        <scope>provided</scope>
    </dependency>
<dependencyManagement>

To:

<dependencyManagement>
   <dependency>
      <groupId>org.thirdparty.module</groupId>
        <artifactId>calculation-api</artifactId>
        <version>2.0</version>
        <type>jar</type>
        <scope>provided</scope>
    </dependency>
<dependencyManagement>

Pay attention to the <groupId> section. It turned out that I was forgetting to modifiy the corresponding section of the submodules that define this dependency in their pom files.

It drove me very crazy because the module was available locally.

Even when considering all answers above you might still run into issues that will terminate your maven offline build with an error. Especially, you may experience a warning as follwos:

[WARNING] The POM for org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-resources-plugin:jar:2.6 is missing, no dependency information available

The warning will be immediately followed by further errors and maven will terminate.

For us the safest way to build offline with a maven offline cache created following the hints above is to use following maven offline parameters:

mvn -o -llr -Dmaven.repo.local=<path_to_your_offline_cache> ...

Especially, option -llr prevents you from having to tune your local cache as proposed in answer #4.

Also take care that parameter <localRepositoryin> in your settings.xml points to the correct folder of your local Maven repository.