Maven - alternative .m2 directory

Question

How do I globally change the location of maven's .m2 directory?

Maven uses ${user.home}/.m2 for it's settings, repository cache, etc.

I know that I can:

• point to a different dir for the repository cache (by changing the localRepository attribute in my global config file), but not for anything else (settings.xml, for instance).
• Use the -s CLI option, but I'd have to do that every time I use maven.

But ideally, I'd like a global solution. Intuitively that should be possible..

I'd like to do this because my company sets my ${user.home} to a shared drive which is prone to network issues.

Answer 1

Use the MAVEN_OPTS environment variable to set the location of your repository. Set it in your shell startup, and you don't have to put it on the command line every time.

export MAVEN_OPTS="-Dmaven.repo.local=/path/to/repository" 

You said you wanted to change the .m2 for the settings.xml file as well as the repository directory. You want to set the M2_HOME environment variable. The Maven settings documentation says that it controls where Maven looks for settings.xml. From there, you can control the repository location, etc.

Answer 2

The best option is to create the .m2 in your user.home as a symlink upfront before using Maven to point to a local folder on your machine.

Otherwise you could create a shell alias for the mvn called mymvn (or m3 or whatever) that passes in the -s as well as the local repo location.