New official Maven Central Repository in Europe

Maven Central has become an increasingly important resource for the development community at large. We've put several efforts forward earlier this year to help improve the content quality and to reduce the time required to get artifacts into the repository. These have matured over time and are now automatically validating artifacts. These processes are documented for Maven projects and 3rd-party artifacts.

To improve the experience for users in Europe, Sonatype has provisioned a new official repository in the United Kingdom. This is more than a mere mirror of Central, this system is updated in lockstep with the systems here in the US, and is managed and monitored 24x7 by Contegix, the same team watching over the US repositories. The new repository consists of two fully redundant systems running in parallel to provide complete fail-over capacity.

In addition to the new repository, we have taken several steps to improve and further secure Central itself:

• A new system has replaced Central as the inbound processing engine. On this staging system, we can now vet inbound artifacts for quality and other parameters before publishing them to repo1 and Europe. It also serves as a hot standby for the US repository.
• We've worked with Contegix to implement additional layered security around the repository machines themselves.
• There is a new Jira project to manage any and all concerns and issues with Central, the Mirrors, Content, etc
• We are working to setup another official Central Repository in Asia soon

The new repository is live at http://uk.maven.org/maven2/ if you're using a repository manager, just replace references to http://repo1.maven.org/maven2 with the new url. If you're not, you should be (Whitepapers: Intro to Repository Management / Stages of Repository Adoption), but until you get a repository manager in place, add the following to your settings.xml:

<mirrors>
<mirror>
<id>uk</id>
<mirrorOf>central</mirrorOf>
<url>http://uk.maven.org/maven2/</url>
</mirror>
</mirrors>

Some additional coverage on this topic can be seen at InfoWorld and InfoQ.