could the first ever maven build be made offline?

Question

The problem: you have a zipped java project distribution, which depends on several libraries like spring-core, spring-context, jacskon, testng and slf4j. The task is to make

Answer 1

Maven has a '-o' switch which allows you to build offline:

 -o,--offline                           Work offline

Of course, you will need to have your dependencies already cached into your $HOME/.m2/repository for this to build without errors. You can load the dependencies with:

mvn dependency:go-offline

I tried this process and it doesn't seem to fully work. I did a:

rm -rf $HOME/.m2/repository
mvn dependency:go-offline       # lot of stuff downloaded
# unplugged my network
# develop stuff
mvn install                     # errors from missing plugins

What did work however is:

rm -rf $HOME/.m2/repository
mvn install                     # while still online
# unplugged my network
# develop stuff
mvn install

Answer 2

Specify a local repository location, either within settings.xml file with <localRepository>...</localRepository> or by running mvn with -Dmaven.repo.local=... parameter. After initial project build, all necessary artifacts should be cached locally, and you can reference this repository location the same ways, while running other Maven builds in offline mode (mvn -o ...).

Answer 3

You could run maven dependency:go-offline on a brand new .m2 repo for the concerned project. This should download everything that maven needs to be able to run offline. If these are then put into a project-scope local repo, you should be able to achieve what you want. I haven't tried this though