How does my pom find my parent pom if the repositories are configured in the parent pom?
I've refactored all repository configuration out of my various projects into a parent pom that I've created for the specific purpose of having a single point of configuration for stuff like repo's and distribution management. This is supposed to be best practice as I understand it. In deployed my parent pom to the nexus server, and then tried to run my child projects. They can't find my parent pom . . . this kind of makes sense to me since, wihtout the parent pom they don't know about the nexus repo . . . seems like a chicken and egg kind of thing? Am I missing something obvious?
Answer
It's true that your project needs to know where to find the repositories to download its dependencies. But before going to external repositories, Maven will check your local repository to see if the artifacts it needs are in there. Does your local repository contain the parent pom? If not, you can add it by running
mvn install
on the parent pom. The problem may have been caused by deploying the parent pom directly to Nexus, bypassing your local one. You can avoid this in future by deploying using
mvn deploy
This will first install the artifact locally, and then deploy it to the external repository (Nexus, in your case). More details here: http://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-the-lifecycle.html
If you're in a situation whereby your parent pom is built and deployed by others, this won't help. You can either specify the repositories in your project's pom, or in your local settings.xml. A common approach is to expect all developers to include a repository definition in their local settings.xml which points to your Nexus repository, using it as a mirror for all other repositories. You can then configure each external repository you need in Nexus, and let it retrieve any dependencies you need for you. I'm not familiar with Nexus, but more details on mirroring can be found here: http://maven.apache.org/guides/mini/guide-mirror-settings.html