Missing maven .m2 folder

Jonathan picture Jonathan · May 21, 2011 · Viewed 237.7k times · Source

AFAIK maven does not have an installer for Windows, you simply unzip it wherever you like, as explained here.

However in many places there are references to a .m2 folder under the user folder (in Win7 I would guess it to be by default at C:\Users\.m2. Alas I do not have that folder. Is there some command to create this folder? Am I missing something basic?

Answer

Rich Seller picture Rich Seller · May 21, 2011

On a Windows machine, the .m2 folder is expected to be located under ${user.home}. On Windows 7 and Vista this resolves to <root>\Users\<username> and on XP it is <root>\Documents and Settings\<username>\.m2. So you'd normally see it under c:\Users\Jonathan\.m2.

If you want to create a folder with a . prefix on Windows, you can simply do this on the command line.

  • Go to Start->Run
  • Type cmd and press Enter
  • At the command prompt type md c:\Users\Jonathan\.m2 (or equivalent for your ${user.home} value).

Note that you don't actually need the .m2 location unless you want to create a distinct user settings file, which is optional (see the Settings reference for more details).

If you don't need a separate user settings file and don't really want the local repository under your user home you can simply set the location of your repository to a different folder by modifying the global settings file (located in \conf\settings.xml).

The following snippet would set the local repository to c:\Maven\repository for example:

<settings xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/SETTINGS/1.0.0"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/SETTINGS/1.0.0
                  http://maven.apache.org/xsd/settings-1.0.0.xsd">
  <localRepository>c:\Maven\repository</localRepository>
  ...