How to clean old dependencies from maven repositories

Question

I have too many files in  m2 folder where maven stores downloaded dependencies  Is there a way to clean all old dependencies  For example  if there is a dependency with 3 different versions  1  2 and 3  after cleaning there must be only 3rd  How I can do it for all dependencies in  m2 folder

User · Answer

I wanted to remove old dependencies from my Maven repository as well. I thought about just running Florian's answer, but I wanted something that I could run over and over without remembering a long linux snippet, and I wanted something with a little bit of configurability -- more of a program, less of a chain of unix commands, so I took the base idea and made it into a (relatively small) Ruby program, which removes old dependencies based on their last access time.

It doesn't remove "old versions" but since you might actually have two different active projects with two different versions of a dependency, that wouldn't have done what I wanted anyway. Instead, like Florian's answer, it removes dependencies that haven't been accessed recently.

If you want to try it out, you can:

Visit the GitHub repository
Clone the repository, or download the source
Optionally inspect the code to make sure it's not malicious
Run bin/mvnclean

There are options to override the default Maven repository, ignore files, set the threshold date, but you can read those in the README on GitHub.

I'll probably package it as a Ruby gem at some point after I've done a little more work on it, which will simplify matters (gem install mvnclean; mvnclean) if you already have Ruby installed and operational.

User · Answer

It s been more than 6 years since the question was asked  but I didn t find any tool to clean up my repository  So I wrote one myself in python to get rid of old jars  Maybe it will be useful for someone   from os path import isdir from os import listdir import re import shutil  dry run   False    change to True to get a log of what will be removed m2 path     home jb  m2 repository      here comes your repo path version regex      d   d       def check and clean path       files   listdir path      for file in files          if not isdir     join  path  file                 return     last   check if versions files      if last is None          for file in files              check and clean     join  path  file        elif len files     1          return     else          print  update     path split m2 path  1           for file in files              if file    last                  continue             print file      newer version      last                    if not dry run                  shutil rmtree     join  path  file      def check if versions files       if len files     0          return None     last          for file in files          if re match version regex  file               if last                        last   file             if len last split          len file split                        for  current  new  in zip last split       file split                            if int new   gt  int current                           last   file                         break                     elif int new   lt  int current                           break             else                  return None         else              return None     return last   check and clean m2 path    It recursively searches within the  m2 repository and if it finds a catalog where different versions reside it removes all of them but the newest   Say you have the following tree somewhere in your  m2 repo      -- antlr      -- 2 7 2             -- antlr-2 7 2 jar             -- antlr-2 7 2 jar sha1             -- antlr-2 7 2 pom             -- antlr-2 7 2 pom sha1             --  remote repositories      -- 2 7 7          -- antlr-2 7 7 jar          -- antlr-2 7 7 jar sha1          -- antlr-2 7 7 pom          -- antlr-2 7 7 pom sha1          --  remote repositories   Then the script removes version 2 7 2 of antlr and what is left is      -- antlr      -- 2 7 7          -- antlr-2 7 7 jar          -- antlr-2 7 7 jar sha1          -- antlr-2 7 7 pom          -- antlr-2 7 7 pom sha1          --  remote repositories   If any old version  that you actively use  will be removed  It can easily be restored with maven  or other tools that manage dependencies    You can get a log of what is going to be removed without actually removing it by setting dry run   False  The output will go like this   update  org projectlombok lombok 1 18 2  newer version  1 18 6  1 16 20  newer version  1 18 6    This means  that versions 1 16 20 and 1 18 2 of lombok will be removed and 1 18 6 will be left untouched   The file can be found on my github  the latest version

User · Answer

If you are on Unix  you could use the access time of the files in there  Just enable access time for your filesystem  then run a clean build of all your projects you would like to keep dependencies for and then do something like this  UNTESTED     find    m2 -amin  5 -iname    pom    while read pom  do parent  dirname   pom    rm -Rf   parent   done   This will find all   pom files which have last been accessed more than 5 minutes ago  assuming you started your builds max 5 minutes ago  and delete their directories   Add  echo   before the rm to do a  dry-run

User · Answer

Download all actual dependencies of your projects  find your-projects-dir -name pom xml -exec mvn -f      dependency resolve  Move your local maven repository to temporary location  mv    m2   saved-m2  Rename all files maven-metadata-central xml  from saved repository into maven-metadata xml   find   -type f -name  maven-metadata-central xml   -exec rename -v --  s -central             To setup the modified copy of the local repository as a mirror  create the directory    m2 and the file    m2 settings xml with the following content  replacing user with your username     lt settings gt    lt mirrors gt     lt mirror gt      lt id gt mycentral lt  id gt      lt name gt My Central lt  name gt      lt url gt file  home user saved-m2  lt  url gt      lt mirrorOf gt central lt  mirrorOf gt     lt  mirror gt    lt  mirrors gt   lt  settings gt   Resolve your projects dependencies again   find your-projects-dir -name pom xml -exec mvn -f      dependency resolve  Now you have local maven repository with minimal of necessary artifacts  Remove local mirror from config file and from file system

User · Answer

Just clean every content under  m2-- repository folder When you build project all dependencies load here   In your case may be your project earlier was using old version of any dependency and now version is upgraded So better clean  m2 folder and build your project with mvn clean install   Now dependencies with latest version modules will be downloaded in this folder

User · Answer

Short answer -  Deleted  m2 folder in  user home   E g  in windows 10 user home is C  Users user1  Re-build your project using mvn clean package  Only those dependencies would remain  which are required by the projects   Long Answer -  m2 folder is just like a normal folder and the content of the folder is built from different projects  I think there is no way to figure out automatically that which library is  old   In fact old is a vague word  There could be so many reasons when a previous version of a library is used in a project  hence determining which one is unused is not possible   All you could do  is to delete the  m2 folder and re-build all of your projects and then the folder would automatically build with all the required library   If you are concern about only a particular version of a library to be used in all the projects  it is important that the project s pom should also update to latest version  i e  if different POMs refer different versions of the library  all will get downloaded in  m2

User · Answer

Given a POM file for a maven project you can remove all its dependencies in the local repository  by default    m2 respository  using the Apache Maven Dependency Plugin   It includes the dependency purge-local-repository functionality that removes the project dependencies from the local repository  and optionally re-resolve them   To clean the local dependencies you just have to used the optional parameter reResolve and set it to false since it is set to true by default   This command line call should work   mvn dependency purge-local-repository -DreResolve false

User · Answer

You need to copy the dependency you need for project  Having these in hand please clear all the  lt dependency gt  tag embedded into  lt dependencies gt  tag from POM XML file in your project    After saving the file you will not see Maven Dependencies in your Libraries  Then please paste those  lt dependency gt  you have copied earlier   The required jars will be automatically downloaded by Maven  you can see that too in  the generated Maven Dependencies Libraries after saving the file   Thanks

User · Answer

I came up with a utility and hosted on GitHub to clean old versions of libraries in the local Maven repository  The utility  on its default execution removes all older versions of artifacts leaving only the latest ones  Optionally  it can remove all snapshots  sources  javadocs  and also groups or artifacts can be forced   excluded in this process  This cross platform also supports date based removal based on last access   download dates   https   github com techpavan mvn-repo-cleaner

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