windows - Missing maven .m2 folder

Question

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 1

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:UsersJonathan.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:UsersJonathan.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 confsettings.xml).

The following snippet would set the local repository to c:Maven epository 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
epository</localRepository>
  ...