I’m working on a small project with one other developer. We are using libraries that are all available in public maven repositories. We have a single, multi-module maven project but build all of the modules every time in our build server and developer machines. The built artifacts are available on the build server for deployment.
Is there any reason for us to setup a maven repository manager? It would run on the build machine, which I would have to connect to via VPN and is slower than downloading from the internet directly.
The best reason to run a repo manager is to achieve reliable behavior in the face of maven’s treatment of <repository> declarations.
If any dependency you reference, or plugin you use, or dependency of a plugin you use, declares any repositories, maven will start searching for everything in those repositories. And, if they are unreliable or slow, there goes your build. While current policy is to forbid repository declarations in central, there are plenty of historical poms pointing every-which way.
The only cure for this is to set up a repository manager and declare it to be a ‘mirrorOf’ ‘*’ in settings.xml. Then, put the necessary rules in your repository manager to search only the places you want to search.
Of course, if there are more than one of you and you want to share snapshots or releases, you’ll really want a repo manager, too. That’s the obvious reason.
If I turn off my repo manager and just try to build some of my projects that have the bad luck to have plugin/dependencies with repository declarations in their poms, they fail. With the repo manager, all is well.