I spent some time today setting up an internal repository for my Maven build. I wanted to host just the artifacts that are used by my projects and not allow the project build to go outside of that repository. I first setup my repositories like this:

<repositoriesa>
  <repository>
    <id>central</id>
    <name>My Company's Internal Repository</name>
    <url>file:///server/Maven/repo/</url>
  </repository>
</repositories>

The idea behind this setup is that I overrode the “central” repository and pointed it to my internal repository. This way Maven would not try to go out to repo1.maven.org if it did not find something.

And it did not work. After much research and trying many things, it turns out my URL needs to look like this:

<url>file://\\server\Maven\repo\</url>

Hope this helps someone in the future trying to setup a repository on a share.