JBoss Maven repository changes

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For those who were maybe not aware...

As of April 19, 2010, JBoss will be switching over its Maven repo infrastructure to utilize a repository manager (Nexus). Details of the change can be found here. Additionally there is a wiki page describing the new set up from the perspectives of both users and developers.

What does this mean for Hibernate user and developers specifically?

For user, not much really. You can continue to use the same release repository URL (http://repository.jboss.com/maven2) as we have been told it will remain active indefinitely. For the snapshot repository the story is a little bit different as the current snapshot repository URL (http://snapshots.jboss.org/maven2) will remain valid only for a few weeks. However, one gotcha you should be aware of is that the older release repository URL will still contain the (sometimes bad) copies of stuff from central. Using the newer URLs alleviates that.

For developers, well it means you have a few options:

  • You could use the JBoss repository as a proxy for many other repositories. Usually though this means adding a mirrorOf entry in your settings.xml which in turn means that the JBoss repo (with all its defined proxies) will be used for all of your builds. http://community.jboss.org/wiki/MavenRepositoryNexusConfiguration lists all the repositories currently proxied.
  • You could also just use the user snapshot repository URL and explicitly list any other repositories you want to use.
  • Yet another option that is just as valid for users is to set up a repository manager of your own locally and use it to proxy all the repositories you use. I have used this approach myself and it works out pretty well; I used Artifactory instead of Nexus however so I cannot speak to Nexus' capabilities or usage. If you are interested in this approach, the take a look at the following guides: Artifactory Guide, Nexus Guide

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