How to clean old dependencies from maven repositories?

java maven dependencies repository dependency-management
Cherry picture Cherry · Oct 11, 2013 · Viewed 140.3k times · Source

I have too many files in .m2 folder where maven stores downloaded dependencies. Is there a way to clean all old dependencies? For example, if there is a dependency with 3 different versions: 1, 2 and 3, after cleaning there must be only 3rd. How I can do it for all dependencies in .m2 folder?

Answer

Florian picture Florian · Apr 30, 2015

If you are on Unix, you could use the access time of the files in there. Just enable access time for your filesystem, then run a clean build of all your projects you would like to keep dependencies for and then do something like this (UNTESTED!):

find ~/.m2 -amin +5 -iname '*.pom' | while read pom; do parent=`dirname "$pom"`; rm -Rf "$parent"; done

This will find all *.pom files which have last been accessed more than 5 minutes ago (assuming you started your builds max 5 minutes ago) and delete their directories.

Add "echo " before the rm to do a 'dry-run'.

Related questions

How to add local jar files to a Maven project?

How do I add local jar files (not yet part of the Maven repository) directly in my project's library sources?

Read More
How do I tell Maven to use the latest version of a dependency?

In Maven, dependencies are usually set up like this: <dependency> <groupId>wonderful-inc</groupId> <artifactId>dream-library</artifactId> <version>1.2.3</version> </dependency> Now, if you are working …

Read More
Maven: Failed to read artifact descriptor

I am hoping someone can help me with a problem I am struggling with. When I try to build my project from the terminal I get this error: Failed to read artifact descriptor for com.morrislgn.merchandising.common:test-data-utils:jar:0.3…

Read More