Unpacking index for Central Repository on Netbeans

Question

I'm having a problem using Netbeans 8.2 on my High Sierra Macbook Air. When it opens it does a few startup things that seem to proceed normally, then it pauses for a minute or so, then it says "unpacking index for central repository." And that's where it gets stuck. It never completes that process, even after a few hours of sitting.

Here are some things that may or may not matter, but in case they're important:

1. At the bottom of Netbeans, to the right of where the updating index message displays, there's a red word bubble with the number 1. The word bubble is there even before unpacking starts. When I click on it, it bring up a notification, but all the notification says is "left button."

2. I originally downloaded Netbeans a year or two ago for a Java class I was taking. At the time we were using Apache Tomcat for the server. I haven't tried to do anything with Apache recently.

3. I downloaded Glassfish about 4 months ago. Can't remember whether I was installing a new JDK or not. I had not used Netbeans since the first Java class, but I was taking a new Java class that had me update things. Don't know if I tried connecting to the Glassfish server (is that right?) or not. I didn't use Netbeans after that, though, because I was able to do my assignments on another computer that had Netbeans installed. I think Netbeans had worked at that point, though. I recall being able to bring up some code. Now, however, when I try to open a project, nothing happens.

Answer 1

I recently ran into this problem on CentOS. The root of the problem was that I was running out of disk space on my main drive (default tmp dir location).

To fix, I modified the netbeans/etc/netbeans.conf to specify a new tmp dir location in the netbeans_default_options setting, adding:

-J-Djava.io.tmpdir=/my/new/tmpdir

When opening a Maven POM for the first time, NetBeans will pull a file from Maven Central and index it, using the tmp dir. On my machine, this indexing operation used almost 6GB of space, which was larger than I had available at the default java.io.tmpdir location. Specifying a new location on a larger disk resolved the problem.

The error message I received from NetBeans was misleading, because it claimed I did not have enough space in my ~/.cache/netbeans dir to perform the cacheing. Changing the netbeans_default_cachedir in netbeans.conf did not resolve the issue. I had to manually watch for files being written to disk to find the problem and deduce it was the tmp dir running out of space, not the cache dir.