How to prevent creating ~/.m2 ?

[xycabcd]

It seems like this extension will try to find a corresponding artifact of a "java.project.referencedLibraries" referenced library in Maven Central. Then a default Maven is invoked and downloads them to ~/.m2 for uses like showing definitions. However, I do not want file appearing in my home directory. How would I prevent this behavior?

Note: There's no Maven project, but only a unmanaged project that has reference to libraries downloaded from Maven Central.

[cookesan]

There are two separate controls that are useful here.

If you only want to stop Maven from going to remote repositories while the Java importer is running, enable Maven offline mode:

{
  "java.import.maven.offline.enabled": true
}

If the main issue is specifically that Maven is writing to ~/.m2, point vscode-java at a Maven settings.xml that uses a different local repository:

{
  "java.configuration.maven.userSettings": "/absolute/path/to/vscode-java-maven-settings.xml"
}

Example vscode-java-maven-settings.xml:

<settings xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/SETTINGS/1.2.0"
          xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
          xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/SETTINGS/1.2.0 https://maven.apache.org/xsd/settings-1.2.0.xsd">
  <localRepository>/absolute/path/to/some/cache/m2-repository</localRepository>
</settings>

So the practical setup is: use java.import.maven.offline.enabled if you want no downloads, and use java.configuration.maven.userSettings plus <localRepository> if downloads/cache are OK but should not be under your home directory.

[xycabcd]

Thank you for replying.

I tried java.import.maven.offline.enabled but a .m2 is still created. In its subdirectories, there are only m2e-lastUpdated.properties files.

[ajay-x0]

You can redirect Maven's local repository instead of letting it use the default ~/.m2/repository.

For example, create a Maven settings.xml with:

/path/to/your/maven-repo

Then configure vscode-java to use that settings file with java.configuration.maven.userSettings.

Alternatively, Maven supports the maven.repo.local property to specify the local repository location.

I don't think there is a vscode-java setting that completely disables the Maven local repository while still allowing Maven to resolve the referenced libraries. For an unmanaged project, the Maven-based artifact resolution is what causes the local cache to be populated.

So if the goal is simply to keep ~/.m2 untouched, redirecting the local repository is probably the safer approach.