Is there a way to tell maven where to place the artifacts?

Question

I am running both maven inside the m2eclipse plugin, windows command line and my cygwin command line.

cygwin's bash shell dumps artifacts into the cygwin /home/me/.m2 directory

but m2eclipse & windows shell (on vista) uses /Users/me/Documents/.m2

Is it possible to tell the mvn command to use one central .m2 directory ?

Thanks

Answer 1

Sure, several ways. The most typical is to specify this in your settings.xml file:

• http://maven.apache.org/settings.html

<settings xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0
                      http://maven.apache.org/xsd/settings-1.0.0.xsd">
  <localRepository>/my/secret/repository</localRepository>
</settings>

Answer 2

For Cygwin, create a file called ~/.mavenrc and put the following text inside:

MAVEN_OPTS="-Dmaven.repo.local=c:\documents and settings\user\.m2\repository"
export MAVEN_OPTS

Alternatively, you can create the file under /etc/.mavenrc

Another option is to create NTFS junction between .m2 under your windows and your cygwin profile.