Maven stores all jars under local repository ~/.m2/repository/. It occupies a lot of space when there are many users.
So, Is it possible to share this local repository by multiple users, perhaps under a different directory structure?
Simple answer No. The local reposiory is as the name implies for the user and not for multiple users. Apart from that Maven itself is not designed for that. It will usually come to problems.
Of course you can share the local repository. You just need a folder that all of you have write permission. e.g.: /local/.m2/repository. And to share this folder, you all can change the settings.xml with new local repository as below:
<localRepository>/local/.m2/repository</localRepository>
Also you all can use the settings.xml in ${MAVEN_HONE}/conf and then you don't need to set private settings.xml.
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Where are Maven and pom.xml file kept in a real-time project if the code is at GitHub. I mean can I keep my local repository somewhere in another machine and use it in my project. If yes, how?
Local repositories are not meant for sharing. They are also not "thread-safe" in any way, so accessing them simultaneously from two different builds might break things.
They are populated by the artifacts Maven downloads from MavenCentral and other repositories, and also the stuff you build yourself. As they are more or less a form of cache, there is no need to share them.
If you need a repository that is used from different machines or by different users, set up a Nexus/Artifactory server.
We want to maintain a common repository for Maven for all the systems within our local network, i.e., there should not be a .m2 directory on every system but on a common server(say with some local ip 172.<>).
Can it be acheived via any file transfer protocol or any other service?
Operating System : Windows
While this is actually possible (you can give Maven a settings.xml on the command line, so you can always point to the one in the network), I would strongly recommend against this:
The Maven local repository is not thread safe. When two guys build against it at the same time, anything might break, especially SNAPSHOT versions. I speak from experience: We tried to have only one local repository on our build server and we got wrong results in different builds.
If you want a repository for your team, you need Nexus or Artifactory.
We are looking into setting up a local maven repository server at our institute. We have several teams that are completely independent and therefore should not have write access to each others artifacts.
Ideally we would like a similar permission concept as e.g. Gitlab, where every user can create a project (or in this case repository) and give permissions to it, but not have write access to any other repositories.
I tried out Artifactory and Nexus, but as far as I could tell, giving permissions to a group for a specific project includes manual work for a user with full admin rights, namely creating that repository.
Is there a freely available maven repository server, that allows creation and administration of repositories by users without giving them access to other repositories? If not, is there one, that can restrict write access for an artifact to the person who first deployed it?
Even better if Artifactory or Nexus can in fact do something like that and I just missed it.
You can create an arbitrary number of repositories in one Nexus 2.x (professional) server. Then you can set up different user accounts with different writing rights, e.g. you can create a projectA repository and define a projectAuser which has writing rights only for this particular repository.
I guess this is possible in Artifactory and Nexus 3 as well, but I do not have experience.
In Artifactory you have many options, I recommend you:
Create a virtual maven repository with permissions for a group of users.
Configure the settings.xml of this group of users with this virtual repository.
Create remote repositories to access to Github or any other websites.
Add these remote repositories to the virtual repository.
Create local repositories if you need and add to the virtual repository.
Do this with every group of users that you want and you will have independent artifacts and repositories.
Is it possible to specify a remote settings.xml file for maven to use?
So it could be convenient to update one settings.xml file in some remote location (server), and the rest of the dev team wouldn't have to download it manualy.
Quite likely you could do this using tricks outside maven itself, such as symlinking or, as mentioned before me, sharing them through a repository.
But you probably should not. The settings.xml file is used for local settings - specific to your machine. You use this for example to specify the location of your local application server or a local database connection, etc. You would have to force every user to use the same file system layout and server setup, which probably requires more hassle than a shared settings.xml would save.
The proper way to share settings across a project is to include them in the project's pom. If you want to share across a team or organisation regardless of project, you can use a parent pom, or even several layers of them.
Simple answer no, cause the settings.xml defines the configuration to access remote resources furthermore it could contain passwords/keys etc. which would not make sense to store remotely.
You can create a git repository which contains ${HOME}/.m2/ included the settings.xml as a template so the onboarding is simpler.
The requirements are as follows. We need copies from binaries we need in our projects on our repository server. We can't just proxy the public repository because we had several cases in the past where the binaries on the public repository were changed without changing the release number and we want to avoid problems imposed by that, thus we want to manually specify when to download it from the public repository and when to update. No changes are ever to be made to the binary stored on our repository server without manual interaction.
Is there a way achieve this? I.e. to say "I want artefacts X, Y, Z" copied to my repository server(preferably including their dependencies). Is this possible with either Nexus or Artifactory?
Yes. In Nexus define your own local repository, manually download the versions you want and add them to your repository. You may have to set up "manual routing" for dependency resolution to ensure that Nexus consults the repos in the correct order.
Then make sure your pom files refer to the specific versions you have downloaded.
One thing that will make this a little easier is that you can place the downloaded artifacts directly into the local storage directory of a Nexus repository (you don't need to upload them into Nexus).
See here for details: https://support.sonatype.com/entries/38605563