Maven Local Repositories

The local repository is a mixed bag, in sense, that it serves two purposes: it caches downloaded artifacts from remote repositories along with locally built and installed ones.

While the local repository does reside on local filesystem, users should never reach for its contents directly using plain file operations, but use the provided API instead. Reason for this strict expectation is that even today different implementations of local repository exists. Hence, “reverse engineering” the layout and direct access to locally cached or installed files may not only break in the future, but may also circumvent important aspects like locking and synchronization, and so forth. Latest resolver even implements “split” local repository, where user may configure local repository to split the installed and cached artifacts, hence to make them physically split from each other.

All these underlying changes remain hidden from code using local repository API, and hence, the code will be more robust and time proof.