In this post we’ll show how to configure Maven to download project libraries from your company’s repository/mirror instead of the Internet.

In most cases, when developing software in corporations, you would like to download all project libraries from a repository (Nexus) located in corporate network, which is much faster than from the Internet.

Configuration for all your Maven projects can be done in ~/.m2/settings.xml (.m2 directory located in your home/user directory):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<settings>
  <!-- other configuration if any -->
  <mirrors>
    <!-- you can setup more mirrors, but usually it's one -->
    <mirror>
      <id>your-company-mirror</id>
      <name>Your Company Mirror</name>
      <url>https://maven.your-company.com/content/groups/all_repos</url>
      <mirrorOf>external:*</mirrorOf>
    </mirror>
  </mirrors>
  <!-- other configuration if any -->
</settings>

Just use the address of your company’s Nexus repository and make sure to set path (here /content/groups/all_repos) to what is used in your company’s Nexus.

The key part is configuration is mirrorOf. It allows to select, using ids or wildcards, which repositories should be mirrored:

• *
  Tells Maven that all libraries should be taken from company’s repository.
• external:*
  Fetch all from company repo, except those on the localhost and from files (sometimes libs are in a project’s subdirectory).
• repoId1,repoId2
  Use company repository instead of repositories with these ids. For others download normally.
• *,!repoId
  Mirror everything except (note the exclamation mark) repository with id repoId.

Now, when you run maven package or just import a project in your IDE, then Maven will download packages from the URL provided above.

Voila! :-)