Maven dependencies are failing with a 501 error

Question

Recently Maven build jobs running in Jenkins are failing with the below exception saying that they couldn\'t pull dependencies from Maven Central

Answer 1

My current environment does not support HTTPS, so adding the insecure version of the repo solved my problem: http://insecure.repo1.maven.org as per Sonatype

    <repositories>
       <repository>
          <id>Central Maven repository</id>
          <name>Central Maven repository insecure</name>
          <url>http://insecure.repo1.maven.org</url>
       </repository>
    </repositories>

Answer 2

For me (corporate coder) also adding a mirror repository in the settings.xml fixed the issue. I am also using Maven inside a docker container.

<mirrors>
    <mirror>
        <id>https-mirror</id>
        <name>Https Mirror Repository</name>
        <url>https://repo1.maven.org/maven2</url>
        <mirrorOf>central</mirrorOf>
    </mirror>
</mirrors>

Answer 3

Add this in pom.xml file. It works fine for me

<pluginRepositories>
    <pluginRepository>
        <id>central</id>
        <name>Central Repository</name>
        <url>https://repo.maven.apache.org/maven2</url>
        <layout>default</layout>
        <snapshots>
            <enabled>false</enabled>
        </snapshots>
        <releases>
            <updatePolicy>never</updatePolicy>
        </releases>
    </pluginRepository>
</pluginRepositories>

<repositories>
    <repository>
        <id>central</id>
        <name>Central Repository</name>
        <url>https://repo.maven.apache.org/maven2</url>
        <layout>default</layout>
        <snapshots>
            <enabled>false</enabled>
        </snapshots>
    </repository>
</repositories>

Answer 4

Sharing this in case anyone needs it:

Old Gradle config( without Gitlab , Docker deployments , for simple projects)

repositories {
google()
jcenter()

maven { url "http://dl.bintray.com/davideas/maven" }
maven { url 'https://plugins.gradle.org/m2/' }
maven { url 'http://repo1.maven.org/maven2' }
maven { url 'http://jcenter.bintray.com' }
}

New config :

repositories {
google()
jcenter()

maven { url "https://dl.bintray.com/davideas/maven" }
maven { url 'https://plugins.gradle.org/m2/' }
maven { url 'https://repo1.maven.org/maven2' }
maven { url 'https://jcenter.bintray.com' }
}

Notice the https. Happy coding :)

Answer 5

The reason for the observed error is explained in Central 501 HTTPS Required

Effective January 15, 2020, The Central Repository no longer supports insecure communication over plain HTTP and requires that all requests to the repository are encrypted over HTTPS.

It looks like latest versions of Maven (tried with 3.6.0, 3.6.1) are already using the HTTPS URL by default.

Here are the dates when the major repositories will switch:

Your Java builds might break starting January 13th (if you haven't yet switched repo access to HTTPS)

Update: Seems like from maven 3.2.3 maven central is accessed via HTTPS See https://stackoverflow.com/a/25411658/5820670

Maven Change log (http://maven.apache.org/docs/3.2.3/release-notes.html)

Answer 6

Originally from https://stackoverflow.com/a/59796324/32453 though this might be useful:

Beware that your parent pom can (re) define repositories as well, and if it has overridden central and specified http for whatever reason, you'll need to fix that (so places to fix: ~/.m2/settings.xml AND also parent poms).

If you can't fix it in parent pom, you can override parent pom's repo's, like this, in your child pom (extracted from the 3.6.3 default super pom, seems they changed the name from repo1 as well):

  <repositories>
    <repository>
      <id>central</id>
      <name>Central Repository</name>
      <url>https://repo.maven.apache.org/maven2</url> <!-- the https you've been looking for -->
      <layout>default</layout>
      <snapshots>
        <enabled>false</enabled> <!-- or set to true if desired, default is false -->
      </snapshots>
    </repository>
  </repositories>