Wiping out Maven local repository on build machine

Question

On a CI build server, the local Maven repository fills up the file system repetitively (after a few days). What strategy are others doing to trim the local repository in such a case? -Max

Answer 1

The Maven dependency plugin has a purge-local-repository goal that allows you to delete the dependencies for a given project from the local repository, if this is run say once a day on each project the snapshots will not accumulate.

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Alternatively there's a more scorched-earth approach you could take. As the problem is typically the timestamped snapshot artifacts, you could use the maven-antrun-plugin to delete all files that match the resource collection pattern.

For example (note this might need some tweaking as I've done it from memory):

<plugin>   <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>   <executions>     <execution>       <phase>package</phase>       <configuration>         <tasks>           <delete>             <fileset dir="${settings.localRepository}">               <include name="**/*.jar"/>               <exclude name="**/*.pom"/>               <exclude name="**/*.war"/>               <exclude name="**/*.ear"/>               <exclude name="**/*.md5"/>               <exclude name="**/*.sha"/>               <!--any other extensions?...-->               <!--match the timestamp pattern-->               <containsregexp expression="[0-9]{8}.[0-9]{6}-[0-9]+"/>             </fileset>           </delete>         </tasks>       </configuration>       <goals>         <goal>run</goal>       </goals>     </execution>   </executions> </plugin> 

Answer 2

If you're using hudson, you can set up a scheduled job to just delete the entire repository once a day or something like that. I've got a job called hudson-maven-repo-clean which has this configuration:

• Build / Execute shell: rm -rf ~hudson/.m2/repository
• Build Triggers / Build periodically: 0 0 * * *