Question

I work for a large company where we use an internally installed maven proxy for downloading dependencies. We have to use a proxy as our Network(Websense) does not allow downloading of files with the .jar extension. So whenever a pom declares an external dependency, maven tries to the get the jar files from the proxy. If it is not there in the proxy, the proxy will itself download it from the internet as the proxy is outside the purview of this Websense Nonsense. This method while not perfect works by and large.

The things that don’t work are

1. Whenever we need to include a dependency for which there is no repository declared in the proxy server, that repository url has to be included manually.
2. The internal maven proxy does not have enough bandwidth to scale up. Some days it takes 10 minutes to download 7 MB jar file.

As a workaround we were thinking that if it were possible to install a P2P plugin in maven, then whenever a jar file is required maven could first check peers (for example local maven repo of the developer sitting next to me) before hitting the internal maven proxy. This will dramatically reduce the time it takes to download dependencies and also potentially avoid the bureaucracy of having someone to put an email to manually add maven repository urls.

Answer 1

You should install a repository manager (Artifactory, Archiva, Nexus in alphabetical order). The intention is to a have a single point which access the internet via the proxy and that should solve the problem. All developers only access the repository manager.